- published: 31 Mar 2011
- views: 5549
- author: flyingdamingo
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- 1991 film
- A Christmas Carol
- A Day by the Sea
- A Diary for Timothy
- A. J. Antoon
- Academy Award
- Academy Awards
- Aces High (film)
- Acting Shakespeare
- Ages of Man
- Ages of Man (play)
- Alan Bennett
- Alan Rickman
- Alan Schneider
- Alec Guinness
- Alfred Drake
- Alfred Hitchcock
- Alfred Lunt
- Allan Warren
- An Expert in Murder
- Anova Books
- Anthony Hopkins
- Anthony Quayle
- Anton Chekhov
- Armand Assante
- Arthur (1981 film)
- Arthur Lowe
- Arthur Penn
- BAFTA Award
- Barry Bostwick
- BBC
- BBC 2
- BBC Radio
- Beau Bridges
- Becket (1964 film)
- Ben Johnson (actor)
- Benedick
- Benicio del Toro
- Benjamin Disraeli
- Bingo (play)
- Binkie Beaumont
- Bipolar disorder
- Blue Man Group
- Brad Dourif
- Brad Pitt
- Broadway theatre
- Broadway theatres
- Bruce Davison
- Bruce Robinson
- Buckinghamshire
- Burt Reynolds
- Caligula (film)
- Cardinal Wolsey
- Carl Van Vechten
- Catastrophe (play)
- Catholic
- Catholic Church
- CBS
- Celia Imrie
- Celia Johnson
- Chariots of Fire
- Charles Wintour
- Charlie Victor Romeo
- Chelsea, London
- Chimes at Midnight
- Christopher Plummer
- Cirque du Soleil
- Closeted
- Colin Welland
- Companion of Honour
- Cottaging
- Cremation
- Cuba Gooding, Jr.
- Cult film
- Daily Mail
- Daniel Auteuil
- Danny DeVito
- Dave Thomas (actor)
- David Mamet
- David Mirvish
- David Remfry
- David Susskind
- Dean Stockwell
- Denholm Elliott
- Denmark
- Denzel Washington
- Derek Jacobi
- Don Ameche
- Dr. John Watson
- Duchess Theatre
- Dudley Moore
- Dustin Hoffman
- Eagle in a Cage
- Early Stages
- Ed Flanders
- Ed Harris
- Ed Mirvish
- Edgar Wallace
- Edith Evans
- Edward Albee
- Edward Asner
- Edward Bond
- Edward Fox (actor)
- Edward James Olmos
- Edward Norton
- Eileen Herlie
- Elia Kazan
- Elizabeth (film)
- Ellen Terry
- Elsinore Castle
- Emlyn Williams
- Emmy Award
- Emmy Awards
- Endgame (play)
- England and Wales
- Ernest Borgnine
- Estelle Parsons
- Everyman Cinema
- Falstaff
- Far East
- Finborough Theatre
- First Knight
- Five Finger Exercise
- Foie gras
- Fool Moon (play)
- François Périer
- Fred Astaire
- Fred Terry
- Gandhi (film)
- Gary Sinise
- Gay Times
- Gelgaudiškis
- Gene Hackman
- George Rose (actor)
- George Rylands
- George Voskovec
- Gerald Clarke
- Gielgud Theatre
- Godalming
- Gold (1974 film)
- Golden Globe Awards
- Grammy Award
- Grammy Awards
- Gulliver
- Guthrie McClintic
- H. M. Tennent
- Haing S. Ngor
- Hal Holbrook
- Half Way Up a Tree
- Hamlet
- Hamlet (1948 film)
- Hamlet (1996 movie)
- Hamlet (play)
- Hampstead
- Harold Pinter
- Harvey Korman
- Haunted (1995 film)
- Henry Ainley
- Henry Fonda
- Henry Irving
- Henry IV of England
- Henry V (1944 film)
- Henry VIII (play)
- Home (play)
- Hugh Wheeler
- Hugh Whitemore
- Hume Cronyn
- Humphrey Jennings
- Iago
- Ian Holm
- Ian McKellen
- Insult (film)
- InterArt Theatre
- Irene Worth
- Ivanov (play)
- Jack Lemmon
- Jack Nicholson
- Jack Palance
- James Brolin
- James Coburn
- James Woods
- Jan Niklas
- Jason
- Jason Robards
- Jasper Britton
- Joan Littlewood
- Joe Pesci
- John Dexter
- John Gielgud
- John Hillerman
- John Hurt
- John Schlesinger
- John Webster
- Joshua Logan
- José Ferrer
- José Quintero
- Judi Dench
- Judith Anderson
- Juliet Capulet
- Julius Caesar (play)
- Kate Terry
- Keith Baxter (actor)
- Kenneth Branagh
- Kenneth MacMillan
- Kenneth More
- Kevin Kline
- Kevin Spacey
- King Lear
- Knight Bachelor
- Laurence Olivier
- Lewis Gielgud
- Lillian Gish
- Lion of the Desert
- Lionel Stander
- Lithuania
- Liverpool
- Liza Minnelli
- London
- London Palladium
- Louis Gossett, Jr.
- Luigi Pirandello
- Lyric Hammersmith
- Macbeth
- Maina Gielgud
- Malvolio
- Margaret Harris
- Marijampolė County
- Marion Terry
- Mark Isham
- Marlon Brando
- Martin Landau
- Martita Hunt
- McLean Stevenson
- Measure for Measure
- Medea
- Mercutio
- Merlin (film)
- Michael Caine
- Michael Korda
- Michael Moriarty
- Michael Palin
- Michael Redgrave
- Michael Saint-Denis
- Mickey Rooney
- Mike Nichols
- Miss Margarida's Way
- Mycroft Holmes
- Nan C. Robertson
- New York
- Newstopia
- Nicholas de Jongh
- Ninette de Valois
- No Man's Land (play)
- Noel Coward Theatre
- Noel Willman
- Norman Fell
- Noël Coward
- Noël Coward Theatre
- Oberon (Fairy King)
- Old Vic Theatre
- Ophelia (character)
- Orson Welles
- Othello
- Oxford
- Pat Harrington, Jr.
- Patrick McGoohan
- Paul Le Mat
- Paul Scofield
- Peggy Ashcroft
- PETA
- Peter Brook
- Peter Finch
- Peter Greenaway
- Peter Sellers
- Peter Strauss
- Peter Ustinov
- Plague Over England
- Plenty (film)
- Poles
- Polish nobility
- Powers Boothe
- Prince Hamlet
- Private Lives
- Professor Moriarty
- Prospero
- Prospero's Books
- Protégé
- Queen's Theatre
- Quest for Camelot
- RADA
- Ralph Richardson
- Ray McAnally
- Raúl Juliá
- Request Concert
- Richard Burton
- Richard Chamberlain
- Richard Crenna
- Richard II (play)
- Richard Kiley
- Richard of Bordeaux
- Richard Wagner
- Robert Duvall
- Robert Morse
- Robin Williams
- Romeo & Juliet
- Romeo and Juliet
- Romeo Montague
- Royal Danish Ballet
- Rutger Hauer
- Sam Wanamaker
- Samuel Beckett
- Screenonline
- Sean Connery
- Shakespeare
- Shakespearean
- Shaun Micallef
- Sheridan Morley
- Sherlock Holmes
- Shine (film)
- Shining Through
- Shylock
- Sidney Poitier
- Simon Russell Beale
- South Kensington
- Spitting Image
- Stanley Tucci
- Stephen King
- Stonewall (UK)
- Sue Townsend
- Summer's Lease
- Surrey
- Swan Song (film)
- Sybil Thorndike
- Sydney Cockerell
- Terry family
- The Best of Friends
- The Cherry Orchard
- The Duchess of Malfi
- The Far Pavilions
- The Final Problem
- The Glass Menagerie
- The Heiress
- The Independent
- The Loved One (film)
- The New York Times
- The Norman Conquests
- The Potting Shed
- The Seagull
- The Shooting Party
- The Tempest
- The Trojans
- The Vortex
- The Whistle Blower
- The Winter's Tale
- Three Sisters (play)
- Tim Conway
- Time Magazine
- Tiny Alice
- Tom Berenger
- Tom Cruise
- Tommy Lee Jones
- Tony Award
- Tony Awards
- Trevor Howard
- Twelfth Night
- Tyrone Guthrie
- Val Gielgud
- Veterans
- Vic Tayback
- Victor Saville
- Vincent J. Donehue
- Vivien Leigh
- Wagner (mini-series)
- War and Remembrance
- Wendy Hiller
- West End theatre
- West End Theatre
- Westminster School
- Who Is the Man?
- Wikipedia Persondata
- William Shakespeare
- Withnail and I
- Wotton House
-
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City. Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
The Broadway theatre district is a popular tourist attraction in New York. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $1.081 billion worth of tickets in calendar year 2011, compared with $1.037 billion for 2010. Attendance in 2011 was 12.13 million.
New York did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street, which held about 280 people. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar's Opera. In 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row). The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, and especially so with the arrival of the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s.
wn.com/Broadway_theatre -
Broadway theatres
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City. Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
The Broadway theatre district is a popular tourist attraction in New York. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $1.081 billion worth of tickets in calendar year 2011, compared with $1.037 billion for 2010. Attendance in 2011 was 12.13 million.
New York did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street, which held about 280 people. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar's Opera. In 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row). The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, and especially so with the arrival of the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s.
wn.com/Broadway_theatres -
Chelsea, London
Coordinates: 51°29′15″N 0°10′06″W / 51.4875°N 0.1684°W / 51.4875; -0.1684
Chelsea is an area of West London, England, bounded to the south by the River Thames, where its frontage runs from Chelsea Bridge along the Chelsea Embankment, Cheyne Walk, Lots Road and Chelsea Harbour. Its eastern boundary was once defined by the River Westbourne, which is now in a pipe above Sloane Square tube station. The modern eastern boundary is Chelsea Bridge Road and the lower half of Sloane Street, including Sloane Square, along with parts of Belgravia. To the north and northwest, the area fades into Knightsbridge and South Kensington, but it is safe to say that the area north of King's Road as far northwest as Fulham Road is part of Chelsea.
The district is part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. From 1900, and until the creation of Greater London in 1965, it formed the Metropolitan Borough of Chelsea in the County of London. Chelsea Football Club, the current champions of European football has its grounds at Stamford Bridge, on the border between Chelsea and neighbouring Fulham.
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Denmark
The Kingdom of Denmark (Danish: Kongeriget Danmark, pronounced [ˈkɔŋəʁiːəð ˈdanmɑɡ̊] (
listen)) is a constitutional monarchy and sovereign state consisting the country of Denmark in northern Europe and two autonomous constituent countries, the Faroe Islands in the North Atlantic and Greenland in North America. The kingdom is a unitary state with some power being devolved from Denmark proper to Greenland and the Faroe Islands; this polity is referred to as the Danish Realm. Denmark proper is the hegemonial area, where judicial, executive, and legislative power resides. The Faroe Islands are defined to be a community of people within the kingdom, and the Greenlandic people are defined as a separate people with the right to self-determination.
Denmark is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, located southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. The country consists of a large peninsula, Jutland and many islands, most notably Zealand, Funen, Lolland, Falster and Bornholm, as well as hundreds of minor islands often referred to as the Danish Archipelago.
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Elsinore Castle
Kronborg is a castle and star fortress in the town of Helsingør, Denmark. Immortalized as Elsinore in William Shakespeare's play Hamlet, Kronborg is one of the most important Renaissance castles in Northern Europe and was added to UNESCO's World Heritage Sites list on November 30, 2000.
The castle is situated on the extreme northeastern tip of the island of Zealand at the narrowest point of the Øresund, the sound between Denmark and Sweden. In this part, the sound is only 4 km wide, hence the strategic importance of maintaining a sea fortress at this location commanding one of the few outlets of the Baltic Sea.
The castle's story dates back to a stronghold, Krogen, built by King Eric VII in the 1420s. Along with the fortress Kärnan, Helsingborg on the opposite coast of Øresund, it controlled the entranceway to the Baltic Sea. From 1574 to 1585 King Frederick II had the medieval fortress radically transformed into a magnificent Renaissance castle. The main architects were the Flemings Hans Hendrik van Paesschen and Anthonis van Obbergen, whereas the sculptural work was coordinated by Gert van Groningen. In 1629 a fire destroyed much of the castle, but King Christian IV subsequently had it rebuilt. In 1658 Kronborg was besieged and captured by the Swedes who took many of its valuable art treasures as war booty. In 1785 the castle ceased to be a royal residence and was converted into barracks for the army. The army left the castle in 1923, and after a thorough renovation it was opened to the public.
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Everyman Cinema
The Everyman, in Hampstead, London, England opened as a cinema on 26 December 1933.
The building was first opened as the Hampstead Drill Hall and Assembly Rooms in the 1880s. Later it was transformed into a theatre, the Everyman Theatre, which opened in 1920 under the direction of Norman MacDermott (1890–1977) with the first British production of Jacinto Benavente's The Bonds of Interest (Los intereses creados, 1907). You Never Can Tell, opened two weeks later and was a success, leading to the performance of more revivals from George Bernard Shaw. Some of the greatest of modern plays were performed on its stage and many actors now famous made their bow at the Everyman Theatre. Noël Coward's The Vortex was first performed there.
Sir Gerald du Maurier presided at the opening of the Everyman and the first programme consisted of Le Million, Turbulent Timber, a Mack Sennett comedy, a Disney cartoon and Paramount News.
The cinema was threatened with closure in 2000. It was rescued by a group of investors, the Everyman Cinemas group, who have expanded their interests into a unique premium cinemas across London (including The Screen On The Green in Islington), Surrey and Hampshire which are renowned for their service and hospitality.
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Gelgaudiškis
Gelgaudiškis (
pronunciation (help·info)) is a city in the Šakiai district municipality, Lithuania. It is located 15 km (9.3 mi) north of Šakiai. The city is just south of Neman River.
Gelgaudiškis is the Lithuanian name of the city. Versions of the name in other languages include Polish: Giełgudyszki, Russian: Гельгудишки Gel'gudishki, Belarusian: Гельгудiшкi Gel'hudishki, Yiddish: גלגודישק Gelgudishk.
Before the end of the 14th century the area of Gelgaudiškis settlement and manor, positioned on the upper bank of Neman, belonged to the Grand Dukes of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1504, King and Grand Duke Aleksander Jagiellon gave it away as a gift to his royal secretary Sapieżyc, progenitor to the szlachta family of Sapieha. Afterwards, the grange belonged to families of Massalski, Dembiński, Oziembłowski, Giełgud, Czartoryski, the Prussian barons von Keudell, and finally Komar family (till the beginning of World War I). In the interwar period, the establishment was nationalized and housed an orphanage and later a school.
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Godalming
Coordinates: 51°11′06″N 0°36′36″W / 51.185°N 0.61°W / 51.185; -0.61
Godalming ( /ˈɡɒdəlmɪŋ/) is a town and civil parish in the Waverley district of the county of Surrey, England, 7 kilometres (4 mi) south of Guildford. It is built on the banks of the River Wey and is a prosperous part of the London commuter belt. Godalming shares a three-way twinning arrangement with the towns of Joigny in France and Mayen in Germany. Friendship links are in place with the state of Georgia in the United States and the city of Moscow in Russia. James Oglethorpe of Godalming was the founder of the colony of Georgia.
The town has existed since Saxon times (see also Godalming (hundred)), and probably earlier. It is mentioned in the will of King Alfred the Great, and the name itself has Saxon origins, 'Godhelms Ingus' roughly translated as “the family of Godhelm”, and probably referring to one of the first lords of the manor.
Godalming grew in size because its location is roughly half-way between Portsmouth and London, which encouraged traders to set up stalls and inns for travellers to buy from and rest in.
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Hampstead
Coordinates: 51°33′15″N 0°10′28″W / 51.5541°N 0.1744°W / 51.5541; -0.1744
Hampstead (/ˈhæmpstɪd/ or /-stɛd/), commonly known as Hampstead Village, is an affluent area of London, England, 4 miles (6.4 km) north-west of Charing Cross. Part of the London Borough of Camden in Inner London, it is known for its intellectual, liberal, artistic, musical and literary associations and for Hampstead Heath, a large, hilly expanse of parkland. It has some of the most expensive housing in the London area. The village of Hampstead has more millionaires within its boundaries than any other area of the United Kingdom.
The name comes from the Anglo-Saxon words ham and stede, which means, and is a cognate of, the Modern English "homestead".
Although early records of Hampstead can be found in a grant by King Ethelred the Unready to the monastery of St. Peter’s at Westminster (AD 986) and it is referred to in the Domesday Book (1086), the history of Hampstead is generally traced back to the 17th century. Trustees of the Well started advertising the medicinal qualities of the chalybeate waters (water impregnated with iron) in 1700. Although Hampstead Wells was initially most successful and fashionable, its popularity declined in the 1800s due to competition with other fashionable London spas. The spa was demolished in 1882, although a water fountain was left behind.
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Lithuania
Lithuania (
i/ˌlɪθuːˈeɪniə/ or /ˌlɪθjuːˈeɪniə/; Lithuanian: Lietuva), officially the Republic of Lithuania (Lithuanian: Lietuvos Respublika) is a country in Northern Europe, the largest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark. It borders Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, Poland to the south, and a Russian exclave (Kaliningrad Oblast) to the southwest. Lithuania has an estimated population of 3.2 million as of 2011, and its capital and largest city is Vilnius. The Lithuanians are a Baltic people, and the official language, Lithuanian, is one of only two living languages (together with Latvian) in the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family.
For centuries, the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea was inhabited by various Baltic tribes. In the 1230s the Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, who was crowned as King of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the first Lithuanian state, on 6 July 1253. During the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest country in Europe: present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia were territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With the Lublin Union of 1569, Lithuania and Poland formed a voluntary two-state union, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth lasted more than two centuries, until neighboring countries systematically dismantled it from 1772 to 1795, with the Russian Empire annexing most of Lithuania's territory.
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Liverpool
Liverpool ( /ˈlɪvəpuːl/) is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880. According to the Office for National Statistics, the 2010 mid-year population estimate for Liverpool was 445,200 and was part of a larger urban area of 816,216.
Historically a part of Lancashire, the urbanisation and expansion of Liverpool were both largely brought about by the city's status as a major port. By the 18th century, trade from the West Indies, Ireland and mainland Europe coupled with close links with the Atlantic Slave Trade furthered the economic expansion of Liverpool. By the early 19th century, 40% of the world's trade passed through Liverpool's docks, contributing to Liverpool's rise as a major city.
Inhabitants of Liverpool are referred to as Liverpudlians but are also colloquially known as "Scousers", in reference to the local dish known as "scouse", a form of stew. The word "Scouse" has also become synonymous with the Liverpool accent and dialect. Liverpool's status as a port city has contributed to its diverse population, which, historically, were drawn from a wide range of peoples, cultures, and religions, particularly those from Ireland. The city is also home to the oldest Black African community in the country and the oldest Chinese community in Europe.
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London
Londoni/ˈlʌndən/ is the capital city of England and the United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its founding by the Romans, who named it Londinium. London's ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its square-mile mediaeval boundaries. Since at least the 19th century, the name London has also referred to the metropolis developed around this core. The bulk of this conurbation forms the London region and the Greater London administrative area, governed by the elected Mayor of London and the London Assembly.
London is a leading global city, with strengths in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism and transport all contributing to its prominence. It is the world's leading financial centre alongside New York City and has the fifth-largest city GDP in the world (and the largest in Europe). London has been described as a world cultural capital. It was the world's most visited city during 2011 and London Heathrow is the world's busiest airport by number of international passengers. London's 43 universities form the largest concentration of higher education in Europe. In 2012 London will become the first city to host the modern Summer Olympic Games three times.
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Marijampolė County
Marijampolė County (Lithuanian: Marijampolės apskritis) is one of the ten counties in Lithuania. It is in the south of the country in the historical Suvalkija region, and its capital is the town Marijampolė. On 1 July 2010, the county administration was abolished, and since that date, Marijampolė County remains as the territorial and statistical unit.
Municipalities are:
Coordinates: 54°33′31″N 23°20′58″E / 54.55861°N 23.34944°E / 54.55861; 23.34944
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New York
New York (/njuː ˈjɔrk/; locally IPA: [nɪu ˈjɔək] or [nuː ˈjɔɹk] (
listen)) is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. New York is the 27th most extensive, the 3rd most populous, and the 7th most densely populated of the 50 United States. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east. The state has a maritime border with Rhode Island east of Long Island, as well as an international border with the Canadian provinces of Ontario to the west and north, and Quebec to the north. The state of New York is often referred to as New York State to distinguish it from New York City.
New York City, with a population of over 8.1 million, is the most populous city in the United States. Alone, it makes up over 40 percent of the population of New York state. It is known for its status as a center for finance and culture and for its status as the largest gateway for immigration to the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, New York City is also a destination of choice for many foreign visitors. Both the state and city were named for the 17th century Duke of York, James Stuart, future James II and VII of England and Scotland.
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Oxford
Oxfordi/ˈɒksfəd/ is a city in central southern England, the home of the University of Oxford. The city is the county town of Oxfordshire, and forms a district within the county. It has a population of just under 165,000, of whom 153,900 live within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles (80 km) north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames (also sometimes known as the Isis locally) run through Oxford and meet south of the city centre.
Oxford has a diverse economic base. Its industries include motor manufacturing, education, publishing and a large number of information technology and science-based businesses.
Buildings in Oxford demonstrate an example of every English architectural period since the arrival of the Saxons, including the iconic, mid-18th century Radcliffe Camera. Oxford is known as the "city of dreaming spires", a term coined by poet Matthew Arnold in reference to the harmonious architecture of Oxford's university buildings. The University of Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world.
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South Kensington
Coordinates: 51°29′28″N 0°10′37″W / 51.4912°N 0.1769°W / 51.4912; -0.1769
South Kensington is a district in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London. It is a built-up area located 2.4 miles (3.9 km) west south-west of Charing Cross.
It is hard to define notional boundaries for South Kensington, but a common definition is the commercial area around the tube station and the adjacent graceful garden squares and streets (such as Thurloe Square, opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum). The smaller neighbourhood around Gloucester Road tube station can also be considered part of South Kensington, as well as the institution area around Exhibition Road, which includes such famous names as the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, Imperial College London, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal College of Art, the Royal College of Music and Baden-Powell House. Although the postcode SW7 mainly covers South Kensington, some parts of Kensington and Knightsbridge also fall under this postcode.
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Surrey
Surrey /ˈsʌri/ is a county in the South East of England, and one of the home counties. The county borders Greater London, Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex, Hampshire, and Berkshire. The historic county town is Guildford.Surrey County Council sits at Kingston upon Thames, although this has been part of Greater London since 1965. The London boroughs of Lambeth, Wandsworth and Southwark were considered part of Surrey until 1889; and Croydon, Kingston, Merton, Sutton, Barnes and Richmond - all now reclassified as part of Greater London - were part of Surrey until 1965.
Surrey is divided into 11 boroughs and districts: Elmbridge, Epsom and Ewell, Guildford, Mole Valley, Reigate and Banstead, Runnymede, Spelthorne, Surrey Heath, Tandridge, Waverley, Woking. After the elections of 1 May 2008, the Conservatives are in control of 10 out of 11 councils in Surrey, with Epsom and Ewell in Residents Association control. The Conservatives hold all 11 Parliamentary constituencies within the county borders.
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West End Theatre
West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London's 'Theatreland', the West End. Along with New York's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. Seeing a West End show is a common tourist activity in London.
Total attendances first surpassed 12 million in 2002 and 13 million in 2007, setting a new record for the West End. Since the late 1990s there has been an increase in the number of famous screen actors on the London stage.
The Theatre in London flourished after the English Reformation. The first permanent public playhouse, known simply as The Theatre, was constructed in 1576 in Shoreditch by James Burbage. It was soon joined by The Curtain. Both are known to have been used by William Shakespeare's company. In 1599, the timber from The Theatre was moved to Southwark, where it was used in building the Globe Theatre in a new theatre district formed, beyond the controls of the City corporation. These theatres were closed in 1642 during the interregnum.
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West End theatre
West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London's 'Theatreland', the West End. Along with New York's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. Seeing a West End show is a common tourist activity in London.
Total attendances first surpassed 12 million in 2002 and 13 million in 2007, setting a new record for the West End. Since the late 1990s there has been an increase in the number of famous screen actors on the London stage.
The Theatre in London flourished after the English Reformation. The first permanent public playhouse, known simply as The Theatre, was constructed in 1576 in Shoreditch by James Burbage. It was soon joined by The Curtain. Both are known to have been used by William Shakespeare's company. In 1599, the timber from The Theatre was moved to Southwark, where it was used in building the Globe Theatre in a new theatre district formed, beyond the controls of the City corporation. These theatres were closed in 1642 during the interregnum.
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Wotton House
Wotton House, or Wotton, the manor house in Wotton Underwood (Buckinghamshire, UK), was rebuilt from the ground up between 1704 and 1714, to a design very similar to that of the contemporary version of Buckingham House, as it is known from engravings. Later radically altered, the house is nevertheless considered a fine example of English Baroque and a Grade I listed building.
After a fire gutted the main house in 1820 it was rebuilt in 1821–22. When the last direct Grenville male heir died in 1899 the house went into decline. By the end of World War II the estate had been sold off in penny packets and the main house was close to derelict.
The stable block was purchased and has had a number of notable owners, and is currently owned by Mr and Mrs Tony Blair. The main house was saved from demolition when Mrs Elaine Brunner purchased it and started the long process of restoring it.
Since the twelfth century the manor house had been the principal seat of the Grenville family, a notable member of whom was George Grenville, the politician who served as Prime Minister between 1763 and 1765. It was rebuilt from the ground up between 1704 and 1714, to a design very similar to that of the contemporary version of Buckingham House, as it is known from engravings. The architect is unknown, but John Fitch and Elizabeth Wilbraham have been suggested.
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A. J. Antoon
A. J. Antoon (December 7, 1944 – January 22, 1992) was an American theatre director. He attended the Yale School of Drama. Beginning in 1971, Antoon directed numerous plays at the New York Shakespeare Festival over a period of nearly 20 years. In 1973, Antoon became one of the few directors to have been nominated for two Tony Awards in the same category in the same year. In addition to winning the Tony Award with one of his nominations, Antoon was also the winner of a Drama Desk Award, a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, and an Obie Award. His career lasted until 1991; he died less than a year later from AIDS-related lymphoma.
Alfred Joseph Antoon was born in Methuen, Massachusetts, on December 7, 1944. His parents were Alfred J. Antoon, Sr. and Josephine Anton (née Saba). Antoon attended Lawrence Central Catholic High School in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts. After high school he studied for priesthood at the Shadowbrook Jesuit seminary in Lenox, Massachusetts while also attending Boston College. He later dropped out from the seminary and earned his Bachelor's Degree from Boston College in 1968. He went on to attend the Yale School of Drama for a year and a half before leaving to begin his work in professional theatre. Antoon died at the age of 47 from AIDS-related lymphoma on January 22, 1992, at the NYU Medical Center. After his death, a collection of Antoon's papers and correspondence was donated to Billy Rose Theatre Collection.
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Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett (born 9 May 1934) is a British playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. Born in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with The Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full time, his first stage play Forty Years On being produced in 1968.
His output includes The Madness of George III and its film incarnation The Madness of King George, the series of monologues Talking Heads, the play The History Boys, and popular audio books, including his readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh.
Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire. The son of a co-op butcher, Walter and his wife Lilian Mary (nee Peel), Bennett attended Christ Church, Upper Armley, Church of England School (in the same class as Barbara Taylor Bradford) and then Leeds Modern School (now Lawnswood School), learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his national service and gained a place at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. However, having spent time in Cambridge during national service, and partly wishing to follow the object of his unrequited love, he decided to apply for a scholarship at Oxford University. He was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford from which he graduated with a first-class degree in history. While at Oxford he performed comedy with a number of eventually successful actors in the Oxford Revue. He was to remain at the university for several years, where he researched and taught Medieval History, before deciding he was not cut out to be an academic.
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Alan Rickman
Alan Sidney Patrick Rickman (born 21 February 1946) is an English actor of stage and screen. He is a renowned stage actor in modern and classical productions and a former member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His breakout performance was as the Vicomte de Valmont in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. Rickman is known for his film performances as Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Severus Snape in the Harry Potter film series, Éamon de Valera in Michael Collins, and Metatron in Dogma.
Rickman has also had a number of other notable film roles such as the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Jamie in Truly, Madly, Deeply, P.L. O'Hara in An Awfully Big Adventure and Colonel Brandon in Ang Lee's 1995 film Sense and Sensibility. More recently, he played Judge Turpin in the film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
Rickman was born in South Hammersmith, London, to a working class family, the son of Margaret Doreen Rose (née Bartlett), a housewife, and Bernard Rickman, a factory worker. Rickman's mother was from Wales and a Methodist, and his father was of Irish Catholic background. He has one elder brother, David (b. 1944), a graphic designer, a younger brother, Michael (b. 1947), a tennis coach, and a younger sister, Sheila (b. 1949). Rickman attended Derwentwater Primary School, in Acton, a school that followed the Montessori method of education.
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Alan Schneider
Alan Schneider (December 12, 1917 – May 3, 1984) was an American theatre director and mentor responsible for more than 100 theatre productions. In 1984 he was honored with a Drama Desk Special Award for serving a wide range of playwrights. He directed the 1956 American premiere of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Edward Albee's Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tiny Alice; the American première of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr Sloane, Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, as well as Pinter's The Dumb Waiter, The Collection, and a trilogy of Pinter's plays under the title Other Places (including One for the Road, Family Voices, and A Kind of Alaska); Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle; You Know I Can't Hear You When the Water's Running; and Michael Weller's Moonchildren and Loose Ends.
Mr. Schneider also directed Samuel Beckett's only direct foray into the world of film, entitled "Film (film)" The short subject starred Buster Keaton and its direction is often mis-attributed to Samuel Beckett himself, notably during an exhibit at the Louvre in November 2006. "Film (film)" is silent and based around Bishop Berkeley's principle 'esse est percipi' (to be is to be perceived).
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Alec Guinness
Sir Alec Guinness, CH, CBE (2 April 1914 – 5 August 2000) was an English actor. After an early career on the stage he was featured in several of the Ealing Comedies, including Kind Hearts and Coronets in which he played eight different characters. However, he was probably best known for his six collaborations with David Lean: Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations (1946), Fagin in Oliver Twist (1948), Col. Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor), Prince Faisal in Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Yevgraf in Doctor Zhivago (1965), and Professor Godbole in A Passage to India (1984). In later years, he achieved fame with younger audiences for his role as Obi-Wan Kenobi in George Lucas’s Star Wars films.
Guinness was born at 155 Lauderdale Mansions South, Lauderdale Road, Maida Vale, London as Alec Guinness de Cuffe. His mother's maiden name was Agnes Cuff. She was born 8 December 1890 to Edward Cuff and Mary Ann Benfield. On Guinness's birth certificate, the space for the mother's name shows Agnes de Cuffe. The space for the infant's name (where first names only are given) says Alec Guinness. The column for name and surname of father is blank.
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Alfred Drake
Alfred Drake (October 7, 1914 - July 25, 1992) was an American actor and singer.
Born as Alfred Capurro in New York City, the son of parents emigrated from Recco, Genoa, Drake began his Broadway career while still a student at Brooklyn College. He is best known for his leading roles in the original Broadway productions of Oklahoma!; Kiss Me, Kate; Kismet; and for playing Marshall Blackstone in the original production of Babes in Arms, (in which he sang the title song) and Hajj in Kismet, for which he received the Tony Award. He was also a prolific Shakespearean, notably starring as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing opposite Katharine Hepburn.
Drake was mostly a stage and television star; he starred in only one film, Tars and Spars, but played several roles on television. His first musical television appearance was as Captain Dick Warrington in the January 15, 1955 live telecast of the operetta "Naughty Marietta". His 1964 stage performance as Claudius in the Richard Burton Hamlet was filmed live on the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, using a "quickie" process called Electronovision, and shown in movie theatres in a very limited engagement. It was also recorded on LP. He played the President of the Stock Exchange in the 1983 Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd film, Trading Places. His final stage appearance in a musical was in 1973 as Honore LaChaisse in Lerner and Loewe's Gigi. Two years later he starred in a revival of The Skin of Our Teeth.
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Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was an English film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood. On 19 April 1955, he became an American citizen while remaining a British subject.
Over a career spanning more than half a century, Hitchcock fashioned for himself a distinctive and recognisable directorial style. He pioneered the use of a camera made to move in a way that mimics a person's gaze, forcing viewers to engage in a form of voyeurism. He framed shots to maximise anxiety, fear, or empathy, and used innovative film editing. His stories frequently feature fugitives on the run from the law alongside "icy blonde" female characters. Many of Hitchcock's films have twist endings and thrilling plots featuring depictions of violence, murder, and crime, although many of the mysteries function as decoys or "MacGuffins" meant only to serve thematic elements in the film and the extremely complex psychological examinations of the characters. Hitchcock's films also borrow many themes from psychoanalysis and feature strong sexual undertones. Through his cameo appearances in his own films, interviews, film trailers, and the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became a cultural icon. Hitchocks reputation as a filmmaker is offset by claims that he engaged in obsessive and controlling behaviour towards many of his leading ladies, and that in some cases this extended to physical abuse and sexual harrassment.
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Alfred Lunt
Alfred Lunt (August 12, 1892 – August 3, 1977) was an American stage director and actor, often identified for a long-time professional partnership with his wife, actress Lynn Fontanne. Broadway's Lunt-Fontanne Theatre was named for them.
Lunt received two Tony Awards, an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for 1931's The Guardsman and an Emmy Award for the Hallmark Hall of Fame's production of The Magnificent Yankee. He became a star in 1919 as the buffoonish lead in Booth Tarkington's Clarence, but soon distinguished himself in a variety of roles. The roles ranged from the Earl of Essex in Maxwell Anderson's Elizabeth the Queen, to a song-and-dance man touring the Balkans in Robert E. Sherwood's Idiot's Delight, a megalomaniacal tycoon in S. N. Behrman's Meteor and Jupiter himself in Jean Giraudoux's Amphitryon 38. His appearances in classical drama were infrequent, but he scored successes in Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew and Chekhov's The Seagull (in which Lunt played Trigorin, his wife played Arkadina, and Uta Hagen made her Broadway debut in the role of Nina). He was described by director and critic Harold Clurman as "universally acclaimed the finest American actor in the generation which followed John Barrymore; the Lunts are absolute angels."
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Allan Warren
Michael Allan Warren (born 26 October 1948 in Wimbledon, London) is an English society-photographer, writer and former actor. His work encompasses works of many celebrities during the late 1960s, 70s and into the 80s, such as members of the British Royal Family, influential politicians and artists in both music and literature as well as some of the most important people in Hollywood at their time.
After growing up in post-war London, Warren attended Terry's Juveniles, a stage school based in the Drury Lane Theatre. It was during this time that he attended auditions through which he received several assignments. One such piece of work was as a child presenter in "The Five O'clock Club", which afforded him the opportunity to associate with a variety of people, including a young Marc Bolan (then performing as "Toby Tyler") who would later employ Warren as his first manager.
Warren started his photographic career at the age of 17 when he was acting in Alan Bennett's play Forty Years On with John Gielgud in the West End at the Apollo Theatre. Around this time Warren bought his first second-hand camera and started to take photographs of his fellow actors. His first major assignment was when his friend Mickey Deans asked him to cover his wedding to Judy Garland, which marked the beginning of Warren's work as a professional photographer. Upon travelling to New York for personal reasons, he attended an audition for the Broadway production of Minnie's Boys. However, he later declined the role offered to him in favour of returning to London and pursuing photography as his vocation.
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Anthony Hopkins
Sir Philip Anthony Hopkins, CBE (born 31 December 1937), best known as Anthony Hopkins, is a Welsh actor of film, stage and television, and a composer. Considered to be one of the greatest living actors, Hopkins is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Other prominent film credits include The Lion in Winter, Magic, The Elephant Man, 84 Charing Cross Road, Dracula, Legends of the Fall, The Remains of the Day, Amistad, Nixon, The World's Fastest Indian, and Fracture. Hopkins was born and brought up in Wales. Retaining his British citizenship, he became a U.S. citizen on 12 April 2000. Hopkins' films have spanned a wide variety of genres, from family films to horror. As well as his Academy Award, Hopkins has also won three BAFTA Awards, two Emmys and the Cecil B. DeMille Golden Globe Award. Hopkins was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1993 for services to the arts. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2003, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in 2008.
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Anthony Quayle
Sir John Anthony Quayle, CBE (7 September 1913 – 20 October 1989) was an English actor and director.
Quayle was born in Ainsdale, Southport, Lancashire to a Manx family.
He was educated at the private Rugby School and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. After appearing in music hall, he joined the Old Vic in 1932. During the Second World War he was an army officer and was made one of the area commanders of the Auxiliary Units. Later he joined the Special Operations Executive and served as a liaison officer with the partisans in Albania (reportedly, his service with the SOE seriously affected him, and he never felt comfortable talking about it). He described his experiences in a fictionalised form in Eight Hours from England. In 1944 he was an aide to the Governor of Gibraltar at the time of the air crash of General Władysław Sikorski's aircraft on 4 July 1943. He fictionalised his Gibraltar experience in his second novel On Such a Night, published by Heinemann.
From 1948 to 1956 Quayle directed at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, and laid the foundations for the creation of the Royal Shakespeare Company. His own Shakespearian roles included Falstaff, Othello, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, Henry VIII and Aaron in Titus Andronicus opposite Laurence Olivier; he played Mosca in Ben Jonson's Volpone; and he also appeared in contemporary plays. He played the role of Moses in Christopher Fry's play The Firstborn, in a production starring opposite Katharine Cornell. He also made an LP with Cornell, in which he played the role of poet Robert Browning in The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
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Anton Chekhov
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (Russian: Анто́н Па́влович Че́хов, pronounced [ɐnˈton ˈpavləvʲɪtɕ ˈtɕexəf]; 29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) was a Russian physician, dramatist and author who is considered to be among the greatest writers of short stories in history. His career as a dramatist produced four classics and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics. Chekhov practised as a doctor throughout most of his literary career: "Medicine is my lawful wife", he once said, "and literature is my mistress."
Chekhov renounced the theatre after the disastrous reception of The Seagull in 1896, but the play was revived to acclaim in 1898 by Constantin Stanislavski's Moscow Art Theatre, which subsequently also produced Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and premiered his last two plays, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. These four works present a challenge to the acting ensemble as well as to audiences, because in place of conventional action Chekhov offers a "theatre of mood" and a "submerged life in the text."
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Armand Assante
Armand Anthony Assante, Jr. (born October 4, 1949) is an American actor.
Assante was born in New York City and raised in Cornwall, New York, the son of Katherine (née Healy), a music teacher and poet, and Armand Anthony Assante, Sr., a painter and artist. His father was Italian and his mother was Irish, and was raised in a devoutly Roman Catholic family. Assante was married to Karen McArn from 1982 to 1994, and has two daughters, Anya and Alessandra.
During the 1970s, Assante was a regular on two NBC soap operas, How to Survive a Marriage as Johnny McGee and The Doctors as Dr. Mike Powers. His first film was The Lords of Flatbush (1974), although the title credits misspelled his last name as Assanti. A role that brought him greater attention came in 1980's Private Benjamin as a handsome Frenchman who becomes the love interest of a U.S. soldier played by Goldie Hawn.
Assante's somewhat sinister look has made him a popular choice for tough-guy heroes, as in his starring role as private eye Mike Hammer in the film I, the Jury (1982) or as Mafia gangsters like that of Michael Moretti in Sidney Sheldon's Rage of Angels. He portrayed the notorious Bugsy Siegel in a comedy, Neil Simon's The Marrying Man (1991), another mobster in Hoffa (1992) starring Jack Nicholson, and crime kingpin John Gotti in the 1996 made-for-television biopic Gotti, for which he won his Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or a Movie.
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Arthur Lowe
Arthur Lowe (22 September 1915 – 15 April 1982) was an English actor. He was best known for playing Captain George Mainwaring in the popular British sitcom Dad's Army from 1968 until 1977.
Arthur Lowe was born in Hayfield, Derbyshire, the only child of Arthur (1888–1971) and his wife Mary Annie (Nan) née Ford (1885–1981). His father worked for a railway company, in charge of moving theatrical touring companies around Northern England and the Midlands in special trains. Young Arthur went to Chapel Street Junior School in Chapel Street, Levenshulme, Manchester. Lowe’s original intention was to join the Merchant Navy but this idea was thwarted because of his poor eyesight. Working at an aircraft factory he joined the British Army on the eve of the Second World War, but not before experiencing his first brush with the acting world by working as a stagehand at the Manchester Palace of Varieties. Lowe served in the Middle East with the Duke of Lancaster's Own Yeomanry, and began to take part in shows put on for the troops, which appears to have sparked his desire to act. He left the Army, in which he served as a radar technician, at the end of the war with the rank of Sergeant Major.
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Arthur Penn
Arthur Hiller Penn (September 27, 1922 – September 28, 2010) was an American film director and producer with a career as a theater director as well. Penn amassed a critically acclaimed body of work throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Penn was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Sonia Greenberg, a nurse, and Harry Penn, a watchmaker. He was the younger brother of Irving Penn, the successful fashion photographer. During the 1920s, he moved in with his mother after she divorced Penn's father. Some time after, he came back to his sickly father, leading him to run his father's watch repair shop. At 19 he was drafted into the army. Stationed in Britain, he became interested in theater. He started to direct and take part in shows being put on for the soldiers around England at the time. As Penn grew up, he further became interested in film, especially after he saw the Orson Welles film Citizen Kane.[citation needed]
After making a name for himself as a director of quality television dramas, Penn made his feature debut with a western, The Left Handed Gun (1958). A retelling of the Billy the Kid legend, it was distinguished by Paul Newman's sharp portrayal of the outlaw as a psychologically troubled youth (the role was originally intended for the archetypal portrayer of troubled teens, James Dean).[citation needed]
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Barry Bostwick
Barry Knapp Bostwick (born February 24, 1945) is an American actor and singer. He is known for playing Brad Majors in the 1975 cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show, replacing Peter Scolari as Mr. Tyler in the sitcom What I Like About You, and playing mayor Randall Winston in the sitcom Spin City. He has also had considerable fame in musical theater.
Bostwick was born in San Mateo, California. He is the son of Elizabeth "Betty" (née Defendorf), a housewife, and Henry "Bud" Bostwick, Jr., a city planner and actor. His only sibling, Henry "Pete" Bostwick, was killed in a car accident on June 20, 1973. Bostwick attended San Diego's United States International University in 1967, majoring in acting, got his start on the Hillbarn Theatre stage now located in Foster City, and worked for a time as a circus performer. He also attended NYU's Graduate Acting Program, graduating in 1968.
In 1970, Bostwick was a member of a pop group called The Klowns, assembled and promoted by Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, whose members performed wearing stylized clown makeup and costumes. Their lone, 1970 album was produced by Jeff Barry, and generated a minor Billboard hit single, "Lady Love".
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Beau Bridges
Lloyd Vernet "Beau" Bridges III (born December 9, 1941) is an American actor and director.
Bridges was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of actors Lloyd and Dorothy Bridges (née Simpson). He was nicknamed Beau by his parents after Ashley Wilkes' son in Gone with the Wind. His younger brother is actor Jeff Bridges, and he has a younger sister Lucinda. Another brother, Garrett, died in 1948 of sudden infant death syndrome. Beau has shared a close relationship with Jeff, to whom he acted as a surrogate father during childhood, when their father was busy with work.[citation needed] He and his siblings were raised in the Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles.
Wanting to become a basketball star, he played in his freshman year at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and later transferred to the University of Hawaii. In 1959, he enlisted in the US Coast Guard and also served for eight years in the Coast Guard Reserve.
In 1949, Bridges played a secondary juvenile role in the movie The Red Pony. In the 1962–63 television season, Bridges, along with his brother, Jeff, appeared on their father's CBS anthology series, The Lloyd Bridges Show. In 1965 he guest-starred as Corporal Corbett in "Then Came The Mighty Hunter", Season 2, Episode 3 of the TV series Twelve O'Clock High. Other TV roles followed in the mid-1960s on shows including The Fugitive, Bonanza, and The Loner. He found steady work in television and film throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Feature films of note during this time were The Other Side of the Mountain (1975), Greased Lightning (1977), Norma Rae (1979), Heart Like a Wheel (1983), and The Hotel New Hampshire (1984).
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Ben Johnson (actor)
Ben "Son" Johnson, Jr. (June 13, 1918 – April 8, 1996) was an American motion picture actor who was mainly cast in Westerns. He was also a rodeo cowboy, stuntman, and rancher.
Johnson was born in Foraker, Oklahoma, on the Osage Indian Reservation, of Irish and Cherokee ancestry, the son of Ollie Susan (née Workmon) and Ben Johnson, Sr. His father was a rancher in Osage County and also a rodeo champion. As a young man, Johnson was a ranch hand and travelled with his father on the rodeo circuit. He was a star in rodeo before becoming involved in the movies. He was the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association's Team Roping World Champion in 1953. After winning the title, he discovered that, after travel and expenses, he broke even for the year. Johnson was inducted into the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association's ProRodeo Hall of Fame in 1973.
Johnson married Carol Elaine Jones in 1941, and they were married for 53 years until her death on March 27, 1994. The couple had no children. Carol Jones was the daughter of noted Hollywood horse wrangler Clarence "Fat" Jones.
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Benicio del Toro
Benicio Monserrate Rafael del Toro Sánchez (born February 19, 1967) is a Puerto Rican actor and film producer. He won an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a BAFTA Award for his role as Javier Rodríguez in Traffic (2000). He is also known for his roles as Fred Fenster in The Usual Suspects (1995), Dr. Gonzo in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998), Franky Four Fingers in Snatch (2000), Jackie Boy in Sin City (2005), and Che Guevara in Che (2008). He is the third Puerto Rican to win an Academy Award.
Benicio del Toro was born in San German, on the southwest side of the island of Puerto Rico, and grew up in Santurce, a district of San Juan. He is the son of Gustavo Adolfo del Toro Bermúdez and Fausta Genoveva Sánchez Rivera, who were both lawyers, and deeply respected and beloved in Puerto Rico for their commitment to their community. Gustavo Del Toro was affectionately called the "lawyer of the poor". Many of Del Toro's relatives are involved in the island's legal system. He has an older brother, Gustavo, who was a pediatric oncologist at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York City. He is of Spanish descent through a Catalan paternal great-grandfather and a Basque maternal great-grandmother, he has Italian and Amerindian ancestry as well. The surname del Toro (Touro) is of Sephardic origin. Benicio del Toro is related to Puerto Rican basketball player Carlos Arroyo, his father Gustavo is a cousin of Arroyo's mother, Gloria Bermudez. Del Toro is also related to Spanish Euro-pop singer Rebeca Pous Del Toro, whose grandfather is Puerto Rican, and Puerto Rican singer Eliseo del Toro.
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Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, KG, PC, FRS, (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British Prime Minister, parliamentarian, Conservative statesman and literary figure. He served in government for three decades, twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Although his father had him baptised to Anglicanism at age 12, he was nonetheless Britain's first and thus far only Prime Minister who was born into a Jewish family—originally from Portugal. He played an instrumental role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party after the Corn Laws schism of 1846.
Although he was a major figure in the protectionist wing of the Conservative Party after 1844, Disraeli's relations with the other leading figures in the party, particularly Lord Derby, the overall leader, were often strained. Not until the 1860s would Derby and Disraeli be on easy terms, and the latter's succession of the former assured. From 1852 onwards, Disraeli's career would also be marked by his often intense rivalry with William Ewart Gladstone, who eventually rose to become leader of the Liberal Party. In this feud, Disraeli was aided by his warm friendship with Queen Victoria, who came to detest Gladstone during the latter's first premiership in the 1870s. In 1876 Disraeli was raised to the peerage as the Earl of Beaconsfield, capping nearly four decades in the House of Commons.
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Binkie Beaumont
Hugh 'Binkie' Beaumont (27 March 1908 – 22 March 1973) was a British theatre manager and producer, referred to as the "Eminence Grise" of the West End Theatre. He was one of the most successful manager-producers in the West End during the middle of the 20th century. The director Tyrone Guthrie commented that, in his prime, Beaumont had the power to make or break just about any theatrical career in London. His company, H. M. Tennent, was based at the Globe Theatre (now renamed The Gielgud Theatre).
Beaumont's true surname and place of birth are both somewhat uncertain, although it is generally thought that he was born in south Wales. (Charlotte Mosley, editor of Love from Nancy: The Letters of Nancy Mitford names him therein as 'Hughes Griffiths Beaumont'.) He was universally known by his nickname 'Binkie'.
His long career began in Cardiff, where he was assistant manager of a theatre. He gained further experience at the Barnes Theatre in London, which was run by the producer Philip Ridgeway.
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Brad Dourif
Bradford Claude "Brad" Dourif (pronounced /ˈdɔrɨf/; born March 18, 1950) is an American film and television actor who gained early fame for his portrayal of Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and has since appeared in a number of memorable roles, including the voice of Chucky in the Child's Play franchise, Deputy Clinton Pell in Mississippi Burning, Younger Brother in Ragtime, the mentat Piter De Vries in David Lynch's Dune, Gríma Wormtongue in The Lord of the Rings, the homicidal Betazoid Lon Suder in the TV series Star Trek: Voyager, serial killer Charles Dexter/Brother Edward in the TV series Babylon 5, and Doc Cochran in the HBO television series Deadwood. Dourif has also worked with renowned film director Werner Herzog on many occasions, appearing in Scream of Stone, The Wild Blue Yonder, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?
Dourif was born in Huntington, West Virginia, the son of Joan Felton (née Bradford), an actress, and Jean Henri Dourif, an art collector who owned and operated a dye factory. His paternal grandparents immigrated from France, and his paternal grandfather co-founded the Standard Ultramarine and Color Company in Huntington. After Dourif's father died in 1953, his mother remarried champion golfer William C. Campbell, who helped raise Dourif and his five siblings (four sisters and one brother). From 1963 to 1965, Dourif attended the private Aiken Preparatory School in Aiken, South Carolina. There he pursued his interests in art and acting. Although he briefly considered becoming an artist, he was eventually inspired to become an actor by his mother's participation as an actress in a community theater. After Aiken Prep, he attended another private school, Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado, graduating in 1969. He attended Marshall University for a time, before quitting college and moving to New York City to study acting, on the advice of actress Conchata Ferrell.
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Brad Pitt
William Bradley "Brad" Pitt (born December 18, 1963) is an American actor and film producer. Pitt has received four Academy Award nominations and five Golden Globe Award nominations, winning one Golden Globe. He has been described as one of the world's most attractive men, a label for which he has received substantial media attention.
Pitt first gained recognition as a cowboy hitchhiker in the road movie Thelma & Louise (1991). His first leading roles in big-budget productions came with A River Runs Through It (1992), Interview with the Vampire (1994), and Legends of the Fall (1994). In 1995, he gave critically acclaimed performances in the crime thriller Seven and the science fiction film 12 Monkeys, the latter earning him a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and an Academy Award nomination. Four years later, Pitt starred in the cult hit Fight Club. He then starred in the major international hit Ocean's Eleven (2001) and its sequels, Ocean's Twelve (2004) and Ocean's Thirteen (2007). His greatest commercial successes have been Troy (2004) and Mr. & Mrs. Smith (2005). Pitt received his second and third Academy Award nominations for his leading performances in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) and Moneyball (2011). In addition, Pitt owns a production company, Plan B Entertainment, whose productions include The Departed (2006), which won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Moneyball, which garnered a Best Picture nomination.
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Cardinal Wolsey
Thomas Wolsey (c. March 1473 – 29 November 1530; sometimes spelled Woolsey) was an English political figure and cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. When Henry VIII became king of England in 1509, Wolsey became the King's almoner. Wolsey's affairs prospered and by 1514 he had become the controlling figure in virtually all matters of state and was extremely powerful within the Church. The highest political position he attained was Lord Chancellor, the King's chief adviser, enjoying great freedom and often depicted as an alter rex (other king). Within the Church he became Archbishop of York, the second most important seat in England, and then was made a cardinal in 1515, giving him precedence over even the Archbishop of Canterbury. His main legacy is from his interest in architecture, in particular his old home of Hampton Court Palace, which stands today.
Thomas Wolsey was born circa 1473, the son of Robert Wolsey of Ipswich and his wife Joan Daundy. His father was widely thought to have been a butcher and a cattle dealer, but sources indicate that Robert Wolsey died at the Battle of Bosworth Field and was a significant casualty.[citation needed] Robert may have been a respected and wealthy cloth merchant, and the butcher story was perhaps invented to demean Wolsey and show how high he had climbed in terms of status.
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Carl Van Vechten
Carl Van Vechten (June 17, 1880 – December 21, 1964) was an American writer and photographer who was a patron of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary executor of Gertrude Stein.
Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he graduated from Washington High School in 1898, and later the University of Chicago in 1903. In 1906, he moved to New York City. He was hired as the assistant music critic at the New York Times. His interest in opera had him take a leave of absence from the paper in 1907, to travel to Europe to explore opera. While in England he married his long time friend from Cedar Rapids, Anna Snyder. He returned to his job at the New York Times in 1909 and then became the first American critic of modern dance. At that time, Isadora Duncan, Anna Pavlova, and Loie Fuller were performing in New York City. The marriage to Anna Snyder ended in divorce in 1912 and he wed actress Fania Marinoff in 1914.
Several books of Van Vechten's essays on various subjects such as music and literature were published between 1915 and 1920. Between 1922 and 1930 Knopf published seven novels by Van Vechten, starting with Peter Whiffle: His Life and Works and ending with Parties.
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Celia Imrie
Celia Diana Savile Imrie (born 15 July 1952) is an English actress. In a career starting in the early 1970s, Imrie has played Marianne Bellshade in Bergerac, Philippa Moorcroft in Dinnerladies, Miss Babs in Acorn Antiques, Diana Neal in After You've Gone and Gloria Millington in Kingdom. She has been described as "one of the most successful British actresses of recent decades".
Imrie was born in 1952 in the county town of Guildford in Surrey, the fourth of five children of Diana Elizabeth Blois (née Cator) and David Andrew Imrie, a radiologist from Glasgow, Scotland.
Imrie was educated at Guildford High School, an independent school for girls in her hometown of Guildford, followed by the Guildford School of Acting.
Imrie's varied career spans films, television and radio drama, and the theatre. Her film credits include Nanny McPhee, Hilary and Jackie (playing Iris du Pré) and the 1997 film of The Borrowers where she played Homily Clock. Other films include Bridget Jones's Diary, Calendar Girls, Highlander and, as Fighter Pilot Bravo 5, in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In 2004, Imrie played Doctor Imogen Reed in the schoolgirl thriller, Out of Bounds. She appeared in St Trinian's in 2007 as the Matron, alongside Stephen Fry, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth, Russell Brand and Mischa Barton.
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Christopher Plummer
Arthur Christopher Orme Plummer, CC (born December 13, 1929) is a Canadian theatre, film and television actor. He made his film debut in 1958's Stage Struck, and notable early film performances include The Night of the Generals, The Return of the Pink Panther, and The Man Who Would Be King.
In a career that spans seven decades and includes substantial roles in each of the dramatic arts, Plummer is probably best known to audiences as the autocratic widower Captain Georg Ludwig von Trapp in the hit 1965 musical film The Sound of Music alongside Julie Andrews. Plummer has also ventured into various television projects, including the legendary miniseries The Thorn Birds.
His most recent film roles include the The Insider as Mike Wallace, the Disney-Pixar 2009 film Up as Charles Muntz, the Shane Acker production 9 as 1, The Last Station as Leo Tolstoy, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus as Doctor Parnassus, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as Henrik Vanger, and Beginners as Hal.
Plummer has won numerous awards and accolades for his work, including an Academy Award, two Emmy Awards, two Tony Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a SAG Award, and a BAFTA Award. With his win at the age of 82 in 2012 for Beginners, Plummer is the oldest actor ever to win an Academy Award.
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Daniel Auteuil
Daniel Auteuil (French pronunciation: [danjɛl otøj]; born 24 January 1950) is a French film, television and theatre actor.
He was born in Algiers, French Algeria.
His starring role in the historical drama film Jean de Florette (1986) and its sequel Manon des Sources (1986) brought him international recognition. Auteuil has since become one of the best-known, best-paid and most popular actors in France. Through his appearances in films including the swashbuckler Le bossu (1997), the comedy The Closet (2001), the romantic comedy After You... (2003), the thriller Caché (2005) and the comedy My Best Friend (2006), he has since gained greater international recognition.
Auteuil has two daughters; Aurore Auteuil with his former partner, Anne Jousset, and Nelly from a ten-year relationship with actress Emmanuelle Béart, his co-star in the films A Heart in Winter and Manon des Sources (1986). He married Aude Ambroggi, a Corsican sculptor, on 22 July 2006 in Porto-Vecchio, Corsica.
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Danny DeVito
Daniel Michael "Danny" DeVito, Jr. (born November 17, 1944) is an American actor, comedian, director and producer. He first gained prominence for his portrayal of short statured dispatcher Louie De Palma on the ABC and NBC television series Taxi (1978–1983), for which he won a Golden Globe and an Emmy.
DeVito and his wife, Rhea Perlman, founded Jersey Films, a production company known for films such as Pulp Fiction, Garden State, and Freedom Writers. DeVito also owns Jersey Television, which produced the Comedy Central series Reno 911!. DeVito and Perlman also starred together in his 1996 film Matilda, based on Roald Dahl's children's novel. He currently stars as Frank Reynolds on the FX sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
DeVito was born in Neptune Township, New Jersey, the son of Julia, a homemaker, and Daniel Michael DeVito, Sr., who owned several small businesses, including a dry cleaning store, a dairy outlet, a luncheonette, and a pool hall. DeVito is of Italian descent (his family is originally from San Fele, Basilicata) and was raised a Roman Catholic, growing up in Asbury Park. He boarded at Oratory Preparatory School, in Summit, New Jersey, graduating in 1962, and subsequently trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, from which he graduated in 1966. In his early theater days, he performed with the Colonnades Theater Lab, Eugene O'Neill Theater Center, and, along with his wife Rhea Perlman, appeared in plays produced by the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective.
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David Mamet
David Alan Mamet ( /ˈmæmɨt/; born November 30, 1947) is an American playwright, essayist, screenwriter and film director.
Best known as a playwright, Mamet won a Pulitzer Prize and received a Tony nomination for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984). He also received a Tony nomination for Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997). Mamet's books include: The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and antisemitism; and Bambi vs. Godzilla, a commentary on the movie business.
Mamet was born in 1947 in Chicago to Jewish parents, Lenore June (Silver), a teacher, and Bernard Morris Mamet, an attorney. One of his first jobs was as a busboy at Chicago's The Second City. He was educated at the progressive Francis W. Parker School and at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.
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David Mirvish
David Mirvish, CM OOnt (born 1945) is a Canadian art collector, art dealer, theatre producer and son of the late "Honest" Ed Mirvish, Toronto discount department store-owner and artist Anne Lazare Macklin.
He owns and operates the Royal Alexandra Theatre, the Princess of Wales Theatre, the Canon Theatre and the Panasonic Theatre, all in Toronto, Ontario. From 2002 to 2005, he was on the Board of Trustees of the Royal Ontario Museum. He was also a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Canada.
From 1963 through 1975, Mirvish operated a contemporary art gallery - the David Mirvish Gallery - specialising in the American abstract painters of the 1960s and 1970s known as the Color Field school.
He closed the gallery in 1975, but continues to buy and sell privately and to lend works to museums for exhibition.
In 1987, took over direction of his father's 1500-seat Toronto theatre, the Royal Alexandra Theatre. For most of the theatre's history, it had functioned as a road house - a temporary venue for touring productions. In 1987, Mr. Mirvish founded the company Mirvish Productions for the purpose of producing and staging original works for the Royal Alexandra and, later, his new Princess of Wales Theatre (opened in 1993).
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David Susskind
David Susskind (December 19, 1920 – February 22, 1987) was a producer of TV, movies, and stage plays and also a pioneer TV talk show host.
Susskind was born in New York City. He attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then Harvard University, graduating with honors in 1942, and then headed off to World War II. A communications officer on an attack transport, he saw action at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
His first job was as a press agent for Warner Brothers. Next he was a talent agent for Century Artists, ultimately ending up in the powerhouse Music Corporation of America's newly-minted television programming department, managing Dinah Shore, Jerry Lewis, and others. In New York, Susskind formed Talent Associates, representing creators of material rather than performers. Ultimately, Susskind produced movies, stage plays and television programs.
He married twice, first to Phyllis Briskin, in 1939, and then Canadian-American television personality Joyce Davidson, in 1966. A year-and-a-half before Susskind and Davidson married, she began working as a co-producer of a television talk show he hosted locally in New York called Hot Line. It was a different show from his nationally known Open End talk show. Hot Line was the first television show to use the recently invented ten-second broadcast delay to amplify viewer phone calls on the air. Davidson screened the viewer phone calls. She also made the first approach to some of the people who appeared as guests on Hot Line, including Malcolm X, whom she invited for Hot Line immediately after he gave a speech at The Town Hall.
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Denzel Washington
Denzel Hayes Washington, Jr. (born December 28, 1954) is an American actor, screenwriter, director, and film producer. He first rose to prominence when he joined the cast of the medical drama, St. Elsewhere, playing Dr. Philip Chandler for six years. He has received much critical acclaim for his work in film since the 1990s, including for his portrayals of real-life figures, such as Steve Biko, Malcolm X, Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Melvin B. Tolson, Frank Lucas and Herman Boone.
Washington has received two Academy Awards, two Golden Globe awards, and a Tony Award. He is notable for winning the Best Supporting Actor for Glory in 1989; and the Academy Award for Best Actor in 2001 for his role in the film Training Day.
Denzel Washington was born in Mount Vernon, near New York City, New York on December 28, 1954. His mother, Lennis "Lynne", was a beauty parlor-owner and operator born in Georgia and partly raised in Harlem. His father, Reverend Denzel Hayes Washington, Sr., a native of Buckingham County, Virginia, served as an ordained Pentecostal minister, and also worked for the Water Department and a local department store, S. Klein.
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Don Ameche
Don Ameche (May 31, 1908 – December 6, 1993) was an Academy Award winning American actor with a career spanning almost sixty years.
After touring in vaudeville, he starred in many film-biographies, including The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), causing the name Ameche to be used as the slang word for a telephone.
He continued to appear on Broadway, as well as on radio and TV, where he was host and commentator for International Showtime, covering circus and ice-shows all over Europe. Ameche remained married to his wife Honore for fifty-four years, and they had six children.
Ameche was born Dominic Felix Amici in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His mother, Barbara Etta (née Hertle), was of Scottish, Irish, and German descent, and his father, Felice Ameche, was an immigrant bartender from Italy, born in Montemonaco, Ascoli Piceno, Marche, Italy whose original surname was "Amici." He had three brothers, Umberto (Bert), James (Jim Ameche), and Louis and three sisters, Jane, Elizabeth and Catherine. Ameche attended Marquette University, Loras College and the University of Wisconsin, where his cousin Alan Ameche played football and won the Heisman Trophy in 1954. Ameche had gone to university to study law but found theatricals far more interesting and so decided on a stage career.
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Dr. John Watson
John H. Watson, M.D., known as Dr. Watson, is a character in the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Watson is Sherlock Holmes's friend, assistant and sometime flatmate, and is the first person narrator of all but four stories in the Sherlock Holmes canon.
Doctor Watson's first name is mentioned on only three occasions. Part one of the very first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, is subtitled 'Being a reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., Late of the Army Medical Department'. In '"The Problem of Thor Bridge"', Watson says that his dispatch box is labeled 'John H. Watson, M.D'.Watson's wife calls him 'James' in "The Man with the Twisted Lip"; Dorothy L. Sayers speculates that Morstan may be referring to his middle name Hamish (which means James in Scottish Gaelic), though Doyle himself never addresses this beyond including the initial. In every other instance, he is called either Doctor or Watson, or both together, and his first name is never used again.
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Dudley Moore
Dudley Stuart John Moore, CBE (19 April 1935 – 27 March 2002) was an English actor, comedian, composer and musician.
Moore first came to prominence as one of the four writer-performers in the ground-breaking comedy revue Beyond the Fringe in the early 1960s, and then became famous as half of the highly popular television double-act he formed with Peter Cook.
His fame as a comedy film actor was later heightened by success in hit Hollywood films such as 10 with Bo Derek and Arthur in the late 1970s and early 1980s, respectively. He received an Oscar nomination for the latter role. He was frequently referred to in the media as "Cuddly Dudley" or "The Sex Thimble", a reference to his short stature and reputation as a "ladies' man".
Moore was born in Charing Cross Hospital, London, the son of Ada Francis (née Hughes), a secretary, and John Moore, a railway electrician. He was brought up in Dagenham, Essex. He was notably short: 5 ft 2.5 in (1.588 m) and was born with club feet that required extensive hospital treatment and which, coupled with his diminutive stature, made him the butt of jokes from other children. His right foot responded well to corrective treatment and had straightened itself by the time he was six, but his left foot became permanently twisted and consequently his left leg below the knee was withered. Seeking refuge from his problems, he became a choirboy at the age of six and took up piano and violin. He rapidly developed into a highly talented pianist and organist and was playing the pipe organ at church weddings by the age of 14. He attended Dagenham County High School (now The Sydney Russell School) where he received musical tuition from a dedicated teacher, Peter Cork. Cork became a friend and confidant to Moore, corresponding with him until 1994.
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Dustin Hoffman
Dustin Lee Hoffman (born August 8, 1937) is an American actor with a career in film, television, and theatre since 1960. He has been known for his versatile portrayals of antiheroes and vulnerable characters.
He first drew critical praise for the play Eh?, for which he won a Theatre World Award and a Drama Desk Award. This was soon followed by his breakthrough movie role as the good-looking but troubled Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967). Since then Hoffman's career has largely been focused on cinema, with only sporadic returns to television and the stage. Some of his most notable films are Papillon, Marathon Man, Midnight Cowboy, Little Big Man, Lenny, All the President's Men, Kramer vs. Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man, Wag the Dog, and Meet the Fockers.
Hoffman has won two Academy Awards (for his performances in Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man), five Golden Globes, four BAFTAs, three Drama Desk Awards, a Genie Award, and an Emmy Award. Dustin Hoffman received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1999.
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Ed Flanders
Edward Paul Flanders (December 29, 1934 - February 22, 1995) was an American actor best known for his role as Dr. Donald Westphall in the television series St. Elsewhere.
Flanders was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Bernice (née Brown) and Francis Michael Grey Flanders. Flanders began his acting career on Broadway before moving on to guest parts in television series. From 1967 through 1975, Flanders appeared in more than a dozen American TV shows, including six appearances on Hawaii Five-O (as six different characters). During this time, he was also prolific in TV movies. He also married actress Ellen Geer during this time; they later divorced.
In the late 1970s, Flanders moved away from small TV roles to take major credits in both TV and feature films, while continuing his stage career. In 1974, Flanders won a Tony Award for Best Supporting or Featured Actor in a Dramatic Presentation for A Moon for the Misbegotten by Eugene O'Neill on Broadway, He also won an Emmy award in 1976 for the TV movie adaptation of A Moon for the Misbegotten.
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Edgar Wallace
Richard Horatio Edgar Wallace (1 April 1875 – 10 February 1932) was an English crime writer, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and playwright, who wrote 175 novels, 24 plays, and numerous articles in newspapers and journals.
Over 160 films have been made of his novels. In the 1920s, one of Wallace's publishers claimed that a quarter of all books read in England were written by him. He is most famous today as the co-creator of King Kong, writing the early screenplay and story for the movie, as well as a short story "King Kong" (1933) credited to him and Draycott Dell. He was known for the J. G. Reeder detective stories, The Four Just Men, The Ringer, and for creating the Green Archer character during his lifetime.
Edgar Wallace was born at 7 Ashburnham Grove, Greenwich (London), on 1 April 1875. His biological parents were actors Richard Horatio Edgar (who never knew of his existence)[citation needed] and Mary Jane "Polly" Richards, née Blair. Born Mary Jane Blair in 1843, Liverpool, to an Irish Catholic family, Mary's family had been in show business for some years, and she grew up to be a theatrical "Jane of All Trades" - stagehand, usherette, bit-part actress. Though pretty and talented, Mary was not a great success. During 1867 she ended her theatrical career and married. Also born in Liverpool during 1838, Captain Joseph Richards of the Merchant Navy was likewise from an Irish Catholic family - his father John Richards was also a Merchant Navy Captain, and his mother Catherine Richards came from a mariner family.
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Edith Evans
Dame Edith Mary Evans, DBE (8 February 1888 – 14 October 1976) was a British actress. She was known for her work on the British stage. She also appeared in a number of films, for which she received three Academy Award nominations, plus a BAFTA and a Golden Globe award.
Evans was particularly well known at portraying haughty aristocratic ladies, as in two of her most famous roles: Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (both on stage and in the 1952 film), and Miss Western in the 1963 film of Tom Jones. By contrast, she played a poverty-stricken old woman in one of her most acclaimed film roles, in The Whisperers (1967).
Edith Evans was born in London, the daughter of Edward Evans, a civil servant, and his wife, Caroline Ellen Foster. She was educated at St Michael's Church of England School, Pimlico, before being apprenticed at the age of 15 in 1903 as a milliner.
Her first stage appearance was with Miss Massey's Shakespeare Players in the role of Viola in Twelfth Night in October 1910. In 1912 she was discovered by the noted producer William Poel and made her first professional appearance for Poel in August of that year, playing the role of Gautami in a 6th century Hindu classic, Sakuntala. She received much attention with her performance as Cressida in Troilus and Cressida in London and subsequently at Stratford-upon-Avon.
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Edward Albee
Edward Franklin Albee III ( /ˈɔːlbiː/ AWL-bee; born March 12, 1928) is an American playwright who is best known for The Zoo Story (1958), The Sandbox (1959), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and a rewrite of the book for the unsuccessful musical version of Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's (1966). His works are considered well-crafted, often unsympathetic examinations of the modern condition. His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of the Theatre of the Absurd that found its peak in works by European playwrights such as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, and Jean Genet. Younger American playwrights, such as Paula Vogel, credit Albee's daring mix of theatricalism and biting dialogue with helping to reinvent the post-war American theatre in the early 1960s. Albee continues to experiment in new works, such as The Goat: or, Who Is Sylvia? (2002).
According to Magill's Survey of American Literature (2007), Edward Albee was born somewhere in Virginia (the popular belief is that he was born in Washington, D.C.). He was adopted two weeks later and taken to Larchmont, New York in Westchester County, where he grew up. Albee's adoptive father, Reed A. Albee, the wealthy son of vaudeville magnate Edward Franklin Albee II, owned several theaters. Here the young Edward first gained familiarity with the theatre as a child. His adoptive mother, Reed's third wife, Frances tried to raise Albee to fit into their social circles.
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Edward Bond
Edward Bond (born 18 July 1934) is an English playwright, theatre director, poet, theorist and screenwriter. He is the author of some fifty plays, among them Saved (1965), the production of which was instrumental in the abolition of theatre censorship in the UK. Bond is broadly considered one among the major living dramatists but he has always been and remains highly controversial because of the violence shown in his plays, the radicalism of his statements about modern theatre and society, and his theories on drama.
Edward Bond was born on 18 July 1934 into a lower working class family in Holloway, North London. As a child during World War II he was evacuated to the countryside but was present during the bombings on London in 1940 and 1944. This early exposure to the violence and terror of war probably shaped themes in his work, while his experience of the evacuation gave him an awareness of social alienation which would characterise his writing.
His first contact with theatre was music-hall, where his sister used to be sawn in two in a conjuror's sideshow. At fourteen, with his class he saw a performance of Shakespeare's Macbeth by Donald Wolfit which was revelatory. He later explained that this performance was the first time he had been presented with traumatic experiences comparable to his own in a way he could apprehend and give meaning to.
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Edward Fox (actor)
Edward Charles Morice Fox,OBE (born 13 April 1937) is an English stage, film and television actor.
He is generally associated with portraying the role of the upper-class Englishman, such as the title character in the film The Day of the Jackal (1973) and King Edward VIII in the serial Edward & Mrs. Simpson (1978).
Fox was born in Chelsea, London, the son of Robin Fox, a theatrical agent, and Angela Muriel Darita Worthington, an actress and writer. He is the elder brother of actor James Fox and film producer Robert Fox, and an uncle of actor Laurence Fox. His paternal great-grandfather was the industrialist and inventor Samson Fox, and his paternal grandmother was Hilda Hanbury, sister of the stage performer Lily Hanbury. His maternal grandfather was the dramatist Frederick Lonsdale, and his maternal grandmother was the daughter of football player and stockbroker Charles Morice. He was educated at Harrow School in northwest London and served as a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, a regiment of the British Army.
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Elia Kazan
Elia Kazan (IPA: [eˈlia kaˈzan]; September 7, 1909 – September 28, 2003) was an American director, producer, writer and actor, described by The New York Times as "one of the most honored and influential directors in Broadway and Hollywood history". He was born in Istanbul, Ottoman Empire, to Greek parents. After studying acting at Yale, he acted professionally for eight years, later joining the Group Theater in 1932, and co-founded the Actors Studio in 1947. With Lee Strasberg, he introduced Method acting to the American stage and cinema as a new form of self-expression and psychological "realism". Kazan acted in only a few films, including City for Conquest (1940).
Kazan introduced a new generation of unknown young actors to the movie audiences, including Marlon Brando and James Dean. Noted for drawing out the best dramatic performances from his actors, he directed 21 actors to Oscar nominations, resulting in nine wins. He became "one of the consummate filmmakers of the 20th century" after directing a string of successful films, including, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), On the Waterfront (1954), and East of Eden (1955). During his career, he won two Oscars as Best Director and received an Honorary Oscar, won three Tony Awards, and four Golden Globes. Among the other actors he introduced to movie audences were Warren Beatty, Carroll Baker, Julie Harris, Andy Griffith, Lee Remick, Rip Torn, Eli Wallach, Eva Marie Saint, Martin Balsam, Fred Gwynne, and Pat Hingle.
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Ellen Terry
Dame Ellen Terry, GBE (27 February 1847 – 21 July 1928) was an English stage actress who became the leading Shakespearean actress in Britain.
Born into a family of actors, Terry began acting as a child in Shakespeare plays and continued as a teen, in London and on tour. At sixteen she married the much older artist George Frederick Watts, but they separated within a year. She briefly returned to acting but then began a relationship with the architect Edward William Godwin and retired from the stage for six years. She returned to acting in 1874 and was immediately acclaimed for her portrayal of roles in Shakespeare and other classics.
In 1878 she joined Henry Irving's company as his leading lady, and for more than the next two decades she was considered the leading Shakespearean and comic actress in Britain. Two of her most famous roles were Portia in The Merchant of Venice and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing. She and Irving also toured with great success in America and Britain.
In 1903 Terry took over management of London's Imperial Theatre, focusing on the plays of George Bernard Shaw and Henrik Ibsen. The venture was a financial failure, however, and Terry then toured and later also lectured. She continued to find acting success until 1920, while also appearing in films until 1922. Her career lasted nearly seven decades.
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Emlyn Williams
George Emlyn Williams, CBE (26 November 1905 – 25 September 1987), known as Emlyn Williams, was a Welsh dramatist and actor.
He was born into a Welsh-speaking, working class family in Mostyn, Flintshire.
Aged 11 he won a scholarship to Holywell Grammar School. At the end of his time at the grammar school he won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford and joined the Oxford University Dramatic Society (OUDS).
In 1927, he joined a repertory company and began his stage career. By 1930, he had branched out into writing with works such as A Murder Has Been Arranged and The Late Christopher Bean. He became an overnight star, however, with his thriller Night Must Fall (1935), in which he also played the lead role of a psychopathic murderer. The play was noted for its exploration of the killer's complex psychological state, a step forward for its genre. It was made into a film in 1937 with Robert Montgomery, and again in 1964 with Albert Finney. It has been frequently revived, including on Broadway in 1999 with Matthew Broderick and most recently in the West End with Jason Donovan.
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Estelle Parsons
Estelle Margaret Parsons (born November 20, 1927) is an American theatre, film and television actress and occasional theatrical director.
After studying law, Parsons became a singer before deciding to pursue a career in acting. She worked for the television program Today and made her stage debut in 1961. During the 1960s, Parsons established her career on Broadway before progressing to film. She received an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Blanche Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), and was also nominated for her work in Rachel, Rachel (1968).
Parsons worked extensively in film and theatre during the 1970s and later directed several Broadway productions. More recently her television work included a role in the sitcom Roseanne. Nominated on four occasions for a Tony Award, in 2004 Parsons was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.
Parsons was born in Lynn, Massachusetts, in the Lynn Hospital, the daughter of Elinor Ingebore (née Mattsson), who was a native of Sweden, and Eben Parsons. She attended the Oak Grove School for Girls in Maine. After graduating from Connecticut College in 1949, Parsons initially studied law at Boston University, and then worked as a singer with a band before settling on an acting career in the early 1950s.
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François Périer
François Périer, (10 November 1919 – 29 June 2002), born François Pillu in Paris, was one of France's most distinguished actors.
He made over 110 film and TV appearances between 1938 and 1996. He was also prominent in the theatre. Among his most notable parts was that of Hugo in the first production of Jean-Paul Sartre's Les Mains Sales in 1948. He was the French narrator in Fantasia .
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Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz; May 10, 1899 – June 22, 1987) was an American film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. His stage and subsequent film career spanned a total of 76 years, during which he made 31 musical films. He was named the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute. He is particularly associated with Ginger Rogers, with whom he made ten films.
Gene Kelly, another major innovator in filmed dance, said that "the history of dance on film begins with Astaire". Beyond film and television, many classical dancers and choreographers, Rudolf Nureyev, Sammy Davis, Jr., Michael Jackson, Gregory Hines, Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins among them, also acknowledged his importance and influence.
Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Johanna "Ann" (née Geilus) and Frederic "Fritz" Austerlitz (born September 8, 1868, as Friedrich Emanuel Austerlitz). Astaire's mother was born in the United States to Lutheran German immigrants from East Prussia and Alsace, while Astaire's father was born in Linz, Austria, to Jewish parents who had converted to Catholicism.
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Fred Terry
Fred Terry (9 November 1863 – 17 April 1933) was an English actor and theatrical manager. After establishing his reputation in London and in the provinces for a decade, he joined the company of Herbert Beerbohm Tree where he remained for four years, meeting his future wife, Julia Neilson. With Neilson, he played in London and on tour for 27 further years, becoming famous in sword and cape roles, such as the title role in The Scarlet Pimpernel.
Terry was born in London into a theatrical family. His parents, Benjamin (1818–1896) of Irish descent, and Sarah (née Ballard) (1819–1892), of Scottish ancestry, were comic actors in a touring company based in Portsmouth (where Sarah's father was a Wesleyan minister) and had eleven children of which Fred was the youngest son. At least five of these became actors: Kate, Ellen, Marion, Florence and Fred. Two other children, George and Charles, were connected with theatre management.
Terry's sister Kate was a very successful actress until her marriage and retirement from the stage in 1867, and his sister Ellen became the greatest Shakespearean actress of her time. His great nephew (Kate's grandson), Sir John Gielgud, became one of the twentieth century's most respected actors. Terry was educated in London, France and Switzerland.
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Gary Sinise
Gary Alan Sinise ( /səˈniːs/; born March 17, 1955) is an American actor, film director and musician. During his career, Sinise has won various awards including an Emmy and a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1992, Sinise directed, and played the role of George Milton in the successful film adaptation of Of Mice and Men. Sinise was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1994 for his role as Lt. Dan Taylor in Forrest Gump. He won a Golden Globe Award for his role in Truman, as Harry S. Truman. In 1996, he played a corrupt police officer in the dramatic hit Ransom, Detective Jimmy Shaker. In 1998, Sinise was awarded an Emmy Award for the television film George Wallace, a portrayal of the late George C. Wallace. Since 2004, Sinise has starred in CBS's CSI: NY as Detective Mac Taylor.
Sinise was born in Blue Island, Illinois, the son of Mylles S. (née Alsip; b. 1932) and Robert L. Sinise (b. 1931), the latter of whom was a film editor. He is of part Italian ancestry (from his paternal grandfather). He attended Highland Park High School in Highland Park, Illinois. In 1974, Sinise and two friends, Terry Kinney and Jeff Perry, founded the Steppenwolf Theatre Company. Since its founding, Steppenwolf has showcased the talents of such notable actors as Joan Allen, Kevin Anderson, Gary Cole, Ethan Hawke, Glenne Headly, John Mahoney, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf, Martha Plimpton, Jim True-Frost and most recently William Petersen. At Steppenwolf, Sinise honed his acting and directing skills, received a Joseph Jefferson Award for his direction of Lyle Kessler's play Orphans, that took him from Chicago, to New York City to London's West End, and worked on more than thirty of the company's productions.
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Gene Hackman
Eugene Allen "Gene" Hackman (born January 30, 1930) is a retired American actor and novelist.
Nominated for five Academy Awards, winning two, Hackman has also won three Golden Globes and two BAFTAs in a career that spanned five decades. He first came to fame in 1967 with his performance as Buck Barrow in Bonnie and Clyde. His major subsequent films include The French Connection (1971), in which he played Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle; The Poseidon Adventure (1972); The Conversation (1974); Superman (1978), in which he played arch-villain Lex Luthor; Hoosiers (1986); Mississippi Burning (1987); Unforgiven (1992); The Firm (1993); Crimson Tide (1995); Get Shorty (1995); The Birdcage (1996); Enemy of the State (1998); and The Royal Tenenbaums (2001).
Hackman was born in San Bernardino, California, the son of Lyda (née Gray) and Eugene Ezra Hackman. He has a brother, Richard. His family moved frequently, finally settling in Danville, Illinois, where they lived in the house of his English-born maternal grandmother, Beatrice. Hackman's father operated the printing press for the Commercial-News, a local paper. Hackman's parents divorced in 1943 and his father subsequently left the family.
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George Rose (actor)
George Rose (19 February 1920 - 5 May 1988) was an English actor in theatre and film.
Born in Bicester, Oxfordshire the son of a butcher, Rose studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama. After graduation he was briefly a farmer and secretary. After wartime service and studies at Oxford, he made his Old Vic stage debut in 1946.
Rose spent four years with the Old Vic company and made his Broadway debut in a 1946 production of Henry IV, Part I and continued to play in New York City and London's West End for the remainder of the decade. He spent most of the 1950s appearing in broad comedy roles in the UK, later joining the Royal Shakespeare Company. He returned to Broadway to portray Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing in 1959. Two years later, he co-starred to much acclaim in Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons, first in London and then in New York. From then on he appeared primarily in American plays and films.
Rose made his screen debut in Midnight Frolics in 1949 and went on to make more than 30 films. Notable film credits include The Pickwick Papers (1952), Track the Man Down (1955), A Night to Remember (1958), Hawaii (1966), A New Leaf (1971), and the film of The Pirates of Penzance (1983). Rose starred in the 1975 television series Beacon Hill, an Americanised version of Upstairs, Downstairs. Other television credits include Naked City, Trials of O'Brien, the mini-series Holocaust (1978), and several appearances on the Hallmark Hall of Fame.
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George Rylands
George Humphrey Wolferstan Rylands CH CBE (23 October 1902–16 January 1999), known as Dadie Rylands, was a British literary scholar and theatre director. Educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge, he was a Fellow of King's from 1927 until his death.
As well as being one of the world's leading Shakespeare scholars, he was actively involved in the theatre. He directed and acted in many productions for the Marlowe Society, and was Chairman of the Cambridge Arts Theatre from 1946 to 1982.
Rylands' 1939 Shakespeare anthology Ages of Man was the basis of John Gielgud's one-man show of the same title. Though Rylands specialized in directing university productions at Oxford, he also directed Gielgud in professional productions of The Duchess of Malfi and Hamlet in London in 1945.
He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1961 and a Companion of Honour (CH) in 1987.
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Gerald Clarke
Gerald Clarke is the author of Capote, the much-acclaimed, bestselling biography of Truman Capote, and Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland. He has also written for many magazines, including Esquire, Architectural Digest, and Time, where for many years he was a senior writer. A native of Los Angeles and a graduate of Yale, he now lives in Bridgehampton, in eastern Long Island, New York.
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Guthrie McClintic
Guthrie McClintic (August 6, 1893 - October 29, 1961) was a successful theatre director, film director and producer based in New York.
McClintic was born in Seattle and attended Washington University and New York's American Academy of Dramatic Arts and became an actor but soon became a stage manager and casting director for major Broadway producer Winthrop Ames. His Broadway directional debut was on A. A. Milne's The Dover Road. McClintic's first major success was on The Barretts of Wimpole Street featuring his wife in 1931. He also directed Hamlet featuring John Gielgud in New York in 1937.
Katharine served on the Board of Directors of The Rehearsal Club, a place where young actresses could stay while looking for work in the theatre. McClintic sometimes found roles for the young women in his plays.
In what may have been lavender marriages, homosexual McClintic was married to actress Estelle Winwood, and then to actress Katharine Cornell--herself a lesbian—for forty years. After they were married, they formed a production team M.C. & C Company, which produced all the plays for the rest of his life. He directed every play that Cornell starred in, including Romeo and Juliet, Candida, Antony and Cleopatra, No Time for Comedy, Antigone, St. Joan, The Doctor's Dilemma, Three Sisters, and There Shall Be No Night, and The Constant Wife. Their production company brought over many of the leading Shakespearean actors of the day, giving them their first prominent Broadway roles, including John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, Maurice Evans, and Laurence Olivier.
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H. M. Tennent
Henry Moncrieff Tennent (18 February 1879 – 10 June 1941), commonly known as H.M. Tennent or Harry Tennent, was a British theatrical producer, impresario and songwriter. From 1929 to 1933 he mentored Binkie Beaumont (having previously worked with him in Cardiff). When Tennent (already General Manager at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and Assistant Managing Director of Moss Empires, a large variety theatre chain) in 1933 persuaded the boards of Moss Empires and of Howard & Wyndham to amalgamate in order the better to produce serious theatre, it was Tennent and Beaumont who became the new company's two chief executives. Their first production at the Queen's Theatre in 1936 was a failure, but later that year they formalised their partnership as the production company 'HM Tennent Ltd', with offices on the top floor of the Globe Theatre (now the Gielgud), and went on to great success. On Tennent's death of a heart attack in 1941, Beaumont found he was unmentioned in Tennent's will, but nevertheless took over as managing director and the sole head of the company.
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Haing S. Ngor
Dr. Haing Somnang Ngor (Chinese: 吳漢潤; pinyin: Wú Hànrùn, March 22, 1940 – February 25, 1996) was a Cambodian American physician, actor and author who is best known for winning the 1985 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his debut performance in the movie The Killing Fields, in which he portrayed Cambodian journalist and refugee Dith Pran. He was also the first ever Asian actor to win an Oscar for a supporting performance and debut performance. His mother was Khmer and his father was of Chinese descent. Ngor and Harold Russell are the only two non-professional actors to win an Academy Award in an acting category.
Born in Samrong Young, Cambodia, Ngor trained as a surgeon and gynecologist. He was practicing in the capital, Phnom Penh, in 1975 when Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge seized control of the country and proclaimed it Democratic Kampuchea. He was compelled to conceal his education, medical skills, and even the fact that he wore glasses to avoid the new regime's intense hostility to intellectuals and professionals. He was expelled from Phnom Penh along with the bulk of its two million inhabitants as part of the Khmer Rouge's "Year Zero" social experiment and imprisoned in a concentration camp along with his wife, My-Huoy, who subsequently died giving birth. Although a gynecologist, he was unable to treat his wife who required a Cesarean section as he would have been exposed and both he and his wife (as well as the child) would very probably have been killed. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, Ngor worked as a doctor in a refugee camp in Thailand and left with his niece for the United States on August 30, 1980. Ngor was not able to resume medical practice in the U.S. He never remarried.
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Hal Holbrook
Harold Rowe "Hal" Holbrook, Jr. (born February 17, 1925) is an American actor. His television roles include Abraham Lincoln in the 1976 TV series Lincoln, Hays Stowe on The Bold Ones: The Senator and Capt. Lloyd Bucher on Pueblo. He is also known for his role in the 2007 film Into the Wild, for which he was nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award and an Academy Award. He has also performed a one-man show as Mark Twain since 1954.
Holbrook was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Aileen Davenport Holbrook, a vaudeville dancer, and Harold Rowe Holbrook, Sr. He was raised in South Weymouth, Massachusetts. He graduated from the Culver Academies and Denison University, where an honors project about Mark Twain led him to develop the one-man show for which he is best known, a series of performances called Mark Twain Tonight (for which he won both a Tony and a Drama Desk Award). Holbrook served in the U.S. Army in World War II and was stationed in Newfoundland, where he performed in theatre productions such as the play Madam Precious.
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Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE (10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008) was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted to film. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works.
Pinter was born and raised in Hackney, east London, and educated at Hackney Downs School. He was a sprinter and a keen cricket player, acting in school plays and writing poetry. He attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but did not complete the course. He was fined for refusing National Service as a conscientious objector. Subsequently, he continued training at the Central School of Speech and Drama and worked in repertory theatre in Ireland and England. In 1956 he married actress Vivien Merchant and had a son, Daniel born in 1958. He left Merchant in 1975 and married author Antonia Fraser in 1980.
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Henry Ainley
Henry Hinchliffe Ainley (21 August 1879 – 31 October 1945) was an English Shakespearean stage and screen actor. He was married three times to Susanne Sheldon, Elaine Fearon and the novelist Bettina Riddle, later Baroness von Hutten zum Stolzenberg. He had several children (although the published obituaries in The Times and The Stage disagree as to the precise numbers) which include the actors Henry T Ainley, Richard Ainley and Anthony Ainley, and also Sam and Timothy Ainley, who were not actors. Timothy and Anthony Ainley were the sons of Clarice Holmes and were registered under that surname. He was also the father of Henrietta Riddle who was briefly engaged to Alistair Cooke in 1932.
A close friend of the writer Roland Pertwee, he was the godfather of his son Jon who played the lead role in Doctor Who from 1970 to 1974 and returned in the 1983 story The Five Doctors playing opposite Anthony Ainley.
He was born in Leeds, where he was baptised in St. George's Parish Church and brought up in Morley by his father Richard, a cloth finisher, and his mother Ada, but moved to London as an adult to pursue an acting career. He made his professional stage debut for F.R. Benson's company of actors and later joined Herbert Beerbohm Tree's company. He found fame in 1902 as Paolo in Paolo and Francesca.
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Henry Fonda
Henry Jaynes Fonda (May 16, 1905 – August 12, 1982) was an American film and stage actor.
Fonda made his mark early as a Broadway actor. He also appeared in 1938 in plays performed in White Plains, New York, with Joan Tompkins. He made his Hollywood debut in 1935, and his career gained momentum after his Academy Award-nominated performance as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, a 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel about an Oklahoma family who moved west during the Dust Bowl. Throughout six decades in Hollywood, Fonda cultivated a strong, appealing screen image in such classics as The Ox-Bow Incident, Mister Roberts and 12 Angry Men. Later, Fonda moved both toward darker epics as Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West and lighter roles in family comedies like Yours, Mine and Ours with Lucille Ball.
Fonda was the patriarch of a family of famous actors, including daughter Jane Fonda, son Peter Fonda, granddaughter Bridget Fonda, and grandson Troy Garity. His family and close friends called him "Hank". In 1999, he was named the sixth-Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute.
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Henry Irving
Sir Henry Irving (6 February 1838 – 13 October 1905), born John Henry Brodribb, was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility (supervision of sets, lighting, direction, casting, as well as playing the leading roles) for season after season at the Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as representative of English classical theatre. Known as "The Governor" to those under his supervision at the Lyceum, he was the first actor to be awarded a knighthood. Irving is thought to have been the inspiration for the title character in Lyceum manager Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula.
Irving was born to a working-class family in Keinton Mandeville in the county of Somerset.W.H. Davies, the celebrated poet, was a cousin. He attended City Commercial School for two years before going to work in the office of a firm of lawyers at the age of 13. After seeing Samuel Phelps play Hamlet soon after this, Irving sought out lessons, letters of introduction, and, finally, work in a theatre in Sunderland in 1856. He married Florence O'Callaghan on 15 July 1869 at St. Marylebone, London. Irving labored against great odds from 1856 till his 1871 success in The Bells in London set him apart from all the rest.
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Henry IV of England
Henry IV (possibly 3 April 1366 – 20 March 1413) was King of England and Lord of Ireland (1399–1413). He was the ninth King of England of the House of Plantagenet and also asserted his grandfather's claim to the title King of France. He was born at Bolingbroke Castle in Lincolnshire, hence his other name, Henry (of) Bolingbroke ( /ˈbɒlɪŋbrʊk/). His father, John of Gaunt, was the third son of Edward III, and enjoyed a position of considerable influence during much of the reign of Henry's cousin Richard II, whom Henry eventually deposed. Henry's mother was Blanche, heiress to the considerable Lancaster estates, thus he became the first King of England from the Lancaster branch of the Plantagenets, one of the two family branches that were belligerents in the War of the Roses. The other one was the York branch, initiated by his uncle Edmund of Langley, 1st Duke of York (see section "Seniority in line from Edward III" below).
One of Henry's elder sisters, Philippa of Lancaster, married John I of Portugal, and his younger sister Elizabeth was the mother of John Holland, 2nd Duke of Exeter. His younger half-sister Catherine, the daughter of his father's second wife, Constance of Castile, was queen consort of Castile. He also had four half-siblings by Katherine Swynford, originally his sisters' governess, then his father's longstanding mistress, and later his third wife. These four children were given the surname Beaufort after a castle their father held in Champagne, France.
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Hugh Whitemore
Hugh Whitemore (born 1936) is an English playwright and screenwriter.
Whitemore studied for the stage at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he is now a Member of the Council. He began his writing career in British television with both original teleplays and adaptations of classic works by Charles Dickens, W. Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, and Charlotte Brontë, among others, and twice won a Writers' Guild of Great Britain award. His work for American TV includes Concealed Enemies, about the Alger Hiss case, and The Gathering Storm, which focused on a troubled period in the marriage of Clementine and Winston Churchill just prior to World War II. He won an Emmy Award for each. He also was nominated for his adaptation of the Carl Bernstein/Bob Woodward book about President Nixon, The Final Days. His most recent teleplay was My House in Umbria (2003), an adaptation of the novella by William Trevor starring Maggie Smith.
Whitemore's film credits include: Man at the Top (1973), All Creatures Great and Small (1975), The Blue Bird (1976), The Return of the Soldier (1982), 84 Charing Cross Road (1987), and Utz (1992).
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Hume Cronyn
Hume Blake Cronyn, OC (July 18, 1911 – June 15, 2003) was a Canadian actor of stage and screen, who enjoyed a long career, often appearing professionally alongside his second wife, Jessica Tandy.
Hume Cronyn, one of five children, was born in London, Ontario, Canada, the son of Hume Blake Cronyn, Sr., a businessman and a Member of Parliament for London (after whom the Hume Cronyn Memorial Observatory and asteroid (12050) Humecronyn are named) and Frances Amelia (née Labatt), an heiress of the brewing company of the same name. His paternal grandfather, Verschoyle Cronyn, was the son of the Right Reverend Benjamin Cronyn, an Anglican cleric of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy, who served as first bishop of the Anglican diocese of Huron, and founder of Huron College, from which grew the University of Western Ontario. His great-uncle, Benjamin, Jr., was both a prominent citizen and early mayor of London, Ontario, but was later indicted for fraud and fled to Vermont; during his tenure in London he built a mansion called Oakwood, which currently serves as the head office of the Info-Tech Research Group. Cronyn was also a cousin of Canadian-born theater producer, Robert Whitehead, and a first cousin of the Canadian-British artist Hugh Verschoyle Cronyn GM (1905–1996).
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Humphrey Jennings
Frank Humphrey Sinkler Jennings (19 August 1907 – 24 September 1950) was an English documentary filmmaker and one of the founders of the Mass Observation organization. Jennings was described by film critic and director Lindsay Anderson in 1954 as: "the only real poet that British cinema has yet produced."
Born in Walberswick, Suffolk, Jennings was the son of Guild Socialists, an architect father and a painter mother. He was educated at The Perse School and later read English at Pembroke College, Cambridge. When not studying, he painted and created advanced stage designs and was the founder-editor of Experiment in collaboration with William Empson and Jacob Bronowski.
After graduating with a starred First Class degree in English, Jennings undertook post graduate research in the poet Thomas Gray, under the supervision of a predominantly absent I. A. Richards, who was teaching abroad. After abandoning what looked like being a successful academic career, Jennings undertook a number of jobs including photographer, painter and theatre designer. He joined GPO Film Unit, then under John Grierson, in 1934, largely it is thought because Jennings needed the income after the birth of his first daughter, rather than from a strong interest in film. Relations with his colleagues were difficult, they saw him as something of a dilettante, but he did form a friendship with Alberto Cavalcanti.
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Ian McKellen
Sir Ian Murray McKellen, CH CBE (born 25 May 1939) is an English actor. He has won multiple Laurence Olivier Awards, a Tony Award, two Academy Award nominations, and five Emmy Award nominations. His work has spanned genres from Shakespearean and modern theatre to popular fantasy and science fiction. He is known for film roles such as Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Magneto in the X-Men films, and as Sir Leigh Teabing in The Da Vinci Code.
McKellen was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1979, was knighted in 1991 for services to the performing arts, and was made a Companion of Honour for services to drama and to equality, in the 2008 New Year Honours.
McKellen was born in Burnley, Lancashire, England, though he spent most of his early life in Wigan. Born shortly before the outbreak of World War II, the experience had some lasting impact on him. In response to an interview question when an interviewer remarked that he seemed quite calm in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, he said: "Well, darling, you forget — I slept under a steel plate until I was four years old."
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Irene Worth
Irene Worth, CBE (June 23, 1916 – March 9, 2002) was an American stage and screen actress who became one of the leading stars of the English and American theatre. (She pronounced her given name with three syllables: "I-REE-nee".)
Harriet Elizabeth Abrams was born in Fairbury, Nebraska to a Mennonite family. Her parents, Agnes Thiessen and Henry Abrams, were educators. They moved from Nebraska to California in 1920. She was educated at Newport Harbor High School, Newport Beach, California, Santa Ana Junior College, Santa Ana, California and UCLA.
She joined the Old Vic company in 1951, worked with Tyrone Guthrie and there played Desdemona, Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Portia in The Merchant of Venice and her first Lady Macbeth. The company went off to South Africa with Worth as one of the leading ladies.
In 1953, she joined the fledgling Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario for its inaugural season. There she was the principal leading lady, performing under an enormous tent with Alec Guinness in All's Well That Ends Well and Richard III. "Binkie" Beaumont brought her back to London in N. C. Hunter's "Chekhovian" drama, A Day by the Sea, with a cast that included John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson. She joined the Midland Theatre Company in Coventry for Ugo Betti's The Queen and the Rebels. Her transformation from "a rejected slut cowering at her lover's feet into a redemption of regal poise" ensured a transfer to London, where Kenneth Tynan wrote of her technique: "It is grandiose, heartfelt, marvellously controlled, clear as crystal and totally unmoving."
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Jack Lemmon
John Uhler "Jack" Lemmon III (February 8, 1925 – June 27, 2001) was an American actor and musician. He starred in more than 60 films including Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Mister Roberts (for which he won the 1955 Best Supporting Actor Academy Award), Days of Wine and Roses, The Great Race, Irma la Douce, The Odd Couple, Save the Tiger (for which he won the 1973 Best Actor Academy Award), The Out-of-Towners, The China Syndrome, Missing (for which he won 'Best Actor' at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival), Glengarry Glen Ross, Grumpy Old Men and Grumpier Old Men.
Lemmon was born in an elevator[citation needed] at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He was the only child of Mildred Burgess LaRue (née Noel) and John Uhler Lemmon, Jr., who was the president of a doughnut company. Lemmon attended John Ward Elementary School in Newton and The Rivers School in Weston, Massachusetts. He had stated that he knew he wanted to be an actor from the age of eight. Lemmon attended Phillips Academy (Class of 1943) and Harvard University (Class of 1947), where he lived in Adams House and was an active member of several Drama Clubs - becoming president of the Hasty Pudding Club - as well as a member of the Delphic Club for Gentleman, a final club at Harvard. After Harvard, Lemmon joined the Navy, receiving V-12 training and serving as an ensign. On being discharged, he took up acting professionally, working on radio, television and Broadway. He studied acting under coach Uta Hagen. He also became enamored of the piano and learned to play it on his own. He could also play the harmonica, organ, and the double bass.
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Jack Nicholson
Not to be confused with Nicholas Jackson
John Joseph "Jack" Nicholson (born April 22, 1937) is an American actor, film director, producer and writer. He is renowned for his often dark portrayals of neurotic characters. His twelve Oscar nominations make him the second most nominated actor of all time, behind only Meryl Streep, and tied with Katharine Hepburn.
Nicholson has been nominated for an Academy Award twelve times and has won the Academy Award for Best Actor twice: for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and for As Good as It Gets. He also won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for the 1983 film Terms of Endearment. He is tied with Walter Brennan for most acting wins by a male actor (three). Nicholson is well known for playing villainous roles such as Jack Torrance in The Shining, Frank Costello in The Departed, and the Joker in 1989's Batman, among many other roles.
Nicholson is one of only two actors who have been nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s; the other is Michael Caine. He has won seven Golden Globe Awards, and received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2001. In 1994, he became one of the youngest actors to be awarded the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award. Notable films in which he has starred include Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Passenger, The Shining, Reds, Terms of Endearment, Batman, A Few Good Men, As Good as It Gets, About Schmidt, The Departed and Anger Management .
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James Brolin
James Brolin /ˈbroʊlɨn/; born July 18, 1940) is an American actor, producer and director, best known for his roles in soap operas, movies, sitcoms, and television. He is the father of actor Josh Brolin and husband of singer/actress Barbra Streisand.
Brolin was born Craig Kenneth Bruderlin in Los Angeles, California. The eldest of two brothers and two sisters, he was the son of Helen Sue (née Mansur), a homemaker, and Henry Hurst Bruderlin, a building contractor. The family settled in Westwood after his birth. As a young child, he was apparently more interested in animals and airplanes than in acting. When Brolin was 10 in 1950, he began building and flying model airplanes. As a teenaged moviegoer in the mid-1950s he was particularly fascinated with actor James Dean. When his parents invited a director over to his family's house for dinner before auditioning, he met another fellow actor and classmate, Ryan O'Neal, who was about a year younger than Brolin. The two clicked and later enrolled in Los Angeles's renowned University High School. However, Bruderlin's own acting exposed his stifling shyness. His assurance grew when O'Neal invited him to a casting agency. Brolin graduated from high school in 1958, and his family was already encouraging him to become an actor like O'Neal.
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James Coburn
James Harrison Coburn III (August 31, 1928 – November 18, 2002) was an American film and television actor. Coburn appeared in nearly 70 films and made over 100 television appearances during his 45-year career, and played a wide range of roles and won an Academy Award for his supporting role as Glen Whitehouse in Affliction.
A capable, rough-hewn leading man, his toothy grin and lanky body made him a perfect tough-guy in numerous leading and supporting roles in Westerns and action films, such as The Magnificent Seven, Hell Is for Heroes, The Great Escape, Major Dundee, Our Man Flint, Duck, You Sucker, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid and Cross of Iron.
During the late 1960s and early 1970s he would cultivate an image synonymous with "cool", and along with such contemporaries as Lee Marvin, Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson, became one of the prominent "tough-guy" actors of his day.
Coburn was born in Laurel, Nebraska, the son of Mylet S. (née Johnson) and James Harrison Coburn, Jr., who had a garage business that was wiped out by the Great Depression. Coburn was of Scotch-Irish and Swedish descent. He was raised in Compton, California, attended Compton Junior College and enlisted in the United States Army in 1950, serving as a truck driver and an occasional disc jockey on an Army radio station in Texas. Coburn also narrated Army training films in Mainz, Germany. He attended Los Angeles City College, where he studied acting alongside Jeff Corey and Stella Adler, then made his stage debut at the La Jolla Playhouse in Billy Budd. Coburn was selected for a Remington Products razor commercial in which he was able to shave off 11 days of beard growth in less than 60 seconds, while joking that he had more teeth to show on camera than the other 12 candidates for the part.
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Jan Niklas
Jan Niklas is a German actor. He is best known for playing in TV films such as Peter The Great, Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna and Anne Frank: The Whole Story. He also played in the Hungarian film Colonel Redl which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Jan Niklas was born October 15, 1947 in Pottenstein, near Nuremberg, Germany. After attending boarding school in England, he took acting classes in London, following this he completed three years of acting classess at the Max Reinhardt Academy in Berlin.
Niklas made his first television appearance on an episode of the German TV series Sonderdezernat K1 as Juniorchef. After playing in a couple of TV movies and miniseries Niklas slowly gained popularity, his breakthrough came in 1985, when he was cast to have a supporting role in István Szabó's war film Oberst Redl. But things went really well when in 1986 he was cast to portray a young Peter the Great in the miniseries Peter the Great, a lot of newspapers and magazines stated that it was Niklas' performance that made the miniseries so believable, the Miami Herald stated:
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Jason Robards
Jason Nelson Robards, Jr. (July 26, 1922 – December 26, 2000) was an American actor on stage, and in film and television. He is a winner of the Tony Award, two Academy Awards and the Emmy Award. He was also a United States Navy combat veteran of World War II.
He became famous playing works of Eugene O'Neill, an American playwright, and regularly performed in O'Neill's works throughout his career. Robards was cast in both common-man roles and as well-known historical figures.
Robards was born in Chicago, the son of Hope Maxine (née Glanville) Robards and Jason Robards, Sr., an actor who regularly appeared on the stage and in such early films as The Gamblers (1929). Robards was of English, Welsh, Irish, and Swedish descent.
The family moved to New York City, New York, when Jason Jr. was still a toddler, and then moved to Los Angeles, California, when he was six years old. Later interviews with Robards suggested that the trauma of his parents' divorce, which occurred during his grade-school years, greatly affected his personality and worldview.
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Jasper Britton
Jasper Britton, (born 11 December 1962) in is an actor.
Britton is the son of veteran actor Tony Britton, and Danish sculptress and member of the World War II Danish Resistance, Eva Castle Britton (née Skytte Birkefeldt). His half-sisters are television presenter Fern Britton and scriptwriter Cherry Britton.
Born in Chelsea, London, Britton attended Belmont Prep and Mill Hill School, where he achieved a grade 'Unclassifed' in Maths O-Level, but where also, bored during a history lesson, he turned over the paper on which he was doodling to discover it was a script of his father's, started to read it, and began a long love affair with the theatre.
Britton worked for six years as an assistant stage manager and sound operator until 1989 when, while working for Jonathan Miller at the Old Vic, he forced his way into Miller's office and refused to leave until Miller agreed to let him audition for King Lear. His King of France to Eric Porter's Lear was the beginning of a prolific stage career.
Early plays included The Visit with Theatre de Complicite at the Royal National Theatre, The Cherry Orchard, Macbeth and A Flea in her Ear at Nottingham Playhouse. A season at the Royal Shakespeare Company included A Jovial Crew for Max Stafford-Clarke, Tamburlaine for Terry Hands and The Beggar's Opera and Anthony and Cleopatra for John Caird. There followed the Dauphin in St Joan at the Strand Theatre and an award winning performance as Rupert in Rope at Salisbury Playhouse.
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Joe Pesci
Joseph Frank "Joe" Pesci (/ˈpɛʃi/PESH-ee; born February 9, 1943) is an American actor, comedian, and musician. He is known for playing a variety of different roles, from violent mobsters to comedic leads to quirky sidekicks. Pesci has starred in a number of high profile films including Goodfellas, Casino, Raging Bull, Once Upon a Time in America, My Cousin Vinny, JFK, Home Alone, and the Lethal Weapon series. He took a six year hiatus from acting between 1999 and 2005 before returning for a cameo in The Good Shepherd (2006).
In 1990, Pesci won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role as the psychotic mobster Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas, ten years after receiving a nomination in the same category for Raging Bull.
Pesci was born in Newark, New Jersey, the son of Mary, who worked part-time as a barber, and Angelo Pesci, a forklift driver for General Motors and bartender. Pesci was raised in Belleville, New Jersey and attended Belleville High School. By the time Pesci was five years old, he was appearing in plays in New York. A few years later, at age ten, he was a regular on a television variety show called Startime Kids, which also featured Connie Francis. He started out working as a barber in the 1960s, following in his mother's footsteps.
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John Dexter
John Dexter (2 August 1925 - 23 March 1990) was an English theatre, opera, and film director.
Born in Derby, England, Dexter left school at the age of fourteen to serve in the British army during World War II. Following the war, he began working as a stage actor before turning to producing and directing shows for repertory companies. In 1957, he was appointed Associate Director of the English Stage Company.
Dexter's first great success was his production of Roots, in 1959, which brought Dame Joan Plowright to prominence. He went on to direct Toys in the Attic (with Dame Wendy Hiller, 1960), and Saint Joan (1963). In 1964, he was named Associate Director of the National Theatre of Great Britain, and he produced The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964).
That year, he also directed Othello, with Sir Laurence Olivier (in one of his greatest roles), Dame Maggie Smith, and Frank Finlay. It was considered a tremendous success. RCA recorded an audio version, and, the following year, Stuart Burge made a film of the production (now available on DVD) for BHE Films.
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John Hillerman
John Benedict Hillerman (born December 20, 1932) is an American actor, known for his starring role on the television show Magnum, P.I.
Hillerman was born in Denison, Texas, the son of Lenora Joan (née Medlinger) and Christopher Benedict Hillerman, a gas station owner. His father, Christopher, was the grandson of immigrants from Germany and France. His mother, Lenora, was the daughter of immigrants from Austria and Germany. Young Hillerman grew up in Denison and attended St. Xavier's Academy. After graduation, he attended the University of Texas at Austin for three years where he majored in journalism. In 1953, he joined the United States Air Force, serving for four years and achieving the rank of Sergeant. During his years of military service, he worked with various theatrical groups, and upon his discharge he moved to New York City to study at the American Theatre Wing. In 1957, he began his career in professional theater as the resident juvenile at Chautauqua Playhouse in Middleton, Ohio.
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John Schlesinger
John Richard Schlesinger, CBE (16 February 1926 – 25 July 2003) was an English film and stage director and actor.
Schlesinger was born in London into a middle-class Jewish family, the son of Winifred Henrietta (née Regensburg) and Bernard Edward Schlesinger, a physician. After St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Uppingham School and Balliol College, Oxford, he worked as an actor.
Schlesinger's acting career began in the 1950s and consisted of supporting roles in British films such as The Divided Heart and Oh... Rosalinda!!, and British television productions such as BBC Sunday Night Theatre and The Vise. He began his directorial career in 1956 with the short documentary Sunday in the Park about London's Hyde Park. In 1959 he was credited as exterior or second unit director on 23 episodes of the TV series The Four Just Men and four 30-minute episodes of the series Danger Man.
By the 1960s, he had virtually given up acting to concentrate on a directing career, and another of his earlier directorial efforts, the British Transport Films' documentary Terminus (1961), gained a Venice Film Festival Gold Lion and a British Academy Award. His first two fiction movies, A Kind of Loving (1962) and Billy Liar (1963) were set in the North of England. A Kind of Loving won the Golden Bear award at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival in 1962.
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John Webster
John Webster (c.1580 – c.1634) was an English Jacobean dramatist best known for his tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, which are often regarded as masterpieces of the early 17th-century English stage. He was a contemporary of William Shakespeare.
Webster's life is obscure, and the dates of his birth and death are not known. His father, a coach maker also named John Webster, married a blacksmith's daughter named Elizabeth Coates on 4 November 1577, and it is likely that Webster was born not long after in or near London. The family lived in St. Sepulchre's parish. Father John, and Uncle, Edward Webster, were Freemen of the Merchant Taylors' Company and Webster attended Merchant Taylors' School in Suffolk Lane, London. On 1 August 1598, "John Webster, lately of the New Inn" was admitted to the Middle Temple, one of the Inns of Court; in view of the legal interests evident in his dramatic work; this is possibly the playwright. Webster married the 17-year-old Sara Peniall on 18 March 1606 at St Mary's Church, Islington. A special licence had to be obtained to permit a wedding in Lent, which was necessary as at the date of their marriage, Sara was seven months pregnant. Their first child, John, was baptised at the parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West on 8 March 1605 or 1606. Bequests in the will of a neighbour who died in 1617 indicate that other children were born to him.
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Joshua Logan
Joshua Lockwood Logan III (October 5, 1908 – July 12, 1988) was an American stage and film director and writer.
Logan was born in Texarkana, Texas, the son of Susan (née Nabors) and Joshua Lockwood Logan. When he was three years old his father committed suicide. Logan, his mother, and younger sister, Mary Lee, then moved to his maternal grandparents’ home in Mansfield, Louisiana, which Logan used forty years later as the setting for his play The Wisteria Trees. Logan's mother remarried six years after his father's death and he then attended Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, where his stepfather served on the staff. At school, he experienced his first drama class and felt at home. After his high school graduation he attended Princeton University. At Princeton, he was involved with the intercollegiate summer stock company, known as the University Players, with fellow student James Stewart and also non-student Henry Fonda. During his senior year he served as president of the Princeton Triangle Club. Before his graduation he won a scholarship to study in Moscow with Constantin Stanislavsky, and Logan left school without a diploma.
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José Ferrer
José Vicente Ferrer de Otero y Cintrón (January 8, 1912 – January 26, 1992), best known as José Ferrer, was a Puerto Rican actor, as well as a theater and film director. He was the first Puerto Rican, as well as the first Hispanic actor to win an Academy Award. Jose Ferrer donated his Academy Award to the University of Puerto Rico as a tribute to his roots. The prolific and distinguished thespian also won numerous Tony Awards: In 1947 he won a Tony Award for his theatrical performance of Cyrano de Bergerac, and in 1952 Ferrer won the Distinguished Dramatic Actor Award for The Shrike, plus the Outstanding Director Award for The Shrike, The Fourposter, and Stalag 17. Jose Ferrer's contributions to American theatre were recognized in 1981 when he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. Further honors came in 1985 when he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Ferrer was born in the Santurce, Puerto Rico, the son of Maria Providencia Cintron and Rafael Ferrer, an attorney and writer. He studied in the Swiss boarding school Institut Le Rosey. In 1933, he graduated from Princeton University, where he wrote a senior thesis "French Naturalism and Pardo Bazán"; he was also a member of the Princeton Triangle Club.
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José Quintero
José Benjamin Quintero (15 October 1924 – 26 February 1999) was a Panamanian theatre director, producer and pedagogue best known for his interpretations of the works of Eugene O'Neill.
Quintero was born in Panama City, Panama, the third of 3 children, to Carlos Rivera Quintero, from Spain, and Consuelo Palmerola. As a boy he was an acolyte though described his childhood in other ways as a disaster—the result of a domineering and overbearing father. He was educated in the United States at Los Angeles City College, and later at the University of Southern California, where he decided on a career in theatre. After notification of his intention, his father, who wanted him to be a physician, declared him dead, leading to a seven year estrangement from his family.
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Judi Dench
Dame Judith Olivia “Judi” Dench, CH, DBE, FRSA (born 9 December 1934) is an English film, stage and television actress.
Dench made her professional debut in 1957 with the Old Vic Company. Over the following few years she played in several of William Shakespeare's plays in such roles as Ophelia in Hamlet, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet and Lady Macbeth in Macbeth. She branched into film work, and won a BAFTA Award as Most Promising Newcomer; however, most of her work during this period was in theatre. Not generally known as a singer, she drew strong reviews for her leading role in the musical Cabaret in 1968.
During the next two decades, she established herself as one of the most significant British theatre performers, working for the National Theatre Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company. In television, she achieved success during this period, in the series A Fine Romance from 1981 until 1984 and in 1992 began a continuing role in the television romantic comedy series As Time Goes By.
Her film appearances were infrequent until she was cast as M in GoldenEye (1995), a role she has played in each James Bond film since. She received several notable film awards for her role as Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown (1997), and has since been acclaimed for her work in such films as Shakespeare in Love (1998), Chocolat (2000), Iris (2001), Mrs Henderson Presents (2005) and Notes on a Scandal (2006), and the television production The Last of the Blonde Bombshells (2001).
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Judith Anderson
Dame Judith Anderson, AC, DBE (10 February 1897 – 3 January 1992) was an Australian-born American-based actress of stage, film and television. She won two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award and was also nominated for a Grammy Award and an Academy Award.
Anderson was born Frances Margaret Anderson-Anderson in Adelaide, South Australia to Jessie Margaret (née Saltmarsh; 19 October 1862 – 24 November 1950) and James Anderson-Anderson. She attended Norwood High School, and began acting in Australia before moving to New York in 1918. She established herself as a dramatic actress of note, making several appearances in the plays of William Shakespeare.
She made her professional debut (as Francee Anderson) in 1915, playing Stephanie at the Theatre Royal, Sydney, in A Royal Divorce. Leading the company was the Scottish actor Julius Knight whom she later credited with laying the foundations of her acting skills. In the company were some American actors who convinced Anderson to try her luck in the United States. She traveled to California but was unsuccessful, then relocated to New York, with an equal lack of success. After a period of poverty and illness, she found work with the Emma Bunting Stock Company at the 14th Street Theatre in 1918–19. She toured with other stock companies until 1922 when she made her Broadway debut in On the Stairs using the name Frances Anderson. Twelve months later, she had changed her name to Judith and had her first triumph with the play Cobra co-starring Louis Calhern. She toured Australia in 1927 with three plays – Tea for Three, The Green Hat and Cobra.[citation needed]
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Kate Terry
Kate Terry (21 April 1844 – 6 January 1924) was an English actress. Elder sister of the famous Ellen Terry, she was born into a theatrical family, made her debut when still a child, became a leading lady in her own right, and left the stage in 1867 to marry. In retirement she commented that she was 20 years on the stage, yet left it when she was only 23. Her grandson was Sir John Gielgud.
Terry was born in England, into a theatrical family. Her parents, Benjamin (1818–1896) and Sarah (née Ballard, 1817–1892), were comic actors in a touring company based in Portsmouth. Kate was the oldest surviving child of eleven, five of whom became actors: Ellen, Florence, Fred, Kate and Marion. Two other children, George and Charles, were connected with theatre management. Terry's grandson, John Gielgud, became one of the twentieth century's most respected actors.
Terry began her career as a child actress in Bristol and then with the company of Charles Kean in Shakespeare productions at London's Princess's Theatre, where in 1851 she made her London debut playing Robin in a juvenile production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, and in 1852 she played the juvenile role of Prince Arthur in King John. She repeated the part in a command performance for Queen Victoria. The historian and poet Lord Macaulay was present and wrote in his diary that it was "worth having passed middle age to have seen little Kate Terry as Prince Arthur."
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Keith Baxter (actor)
Keith Baxter (born 29 April 1933) is a Welsh theatre, film and television actor.
Born in Newport, Wales in 1933. Baxter was educated at Newport High School and Barry Grammar School. He was Christened Keith Baxter-Wright, the son of Merchant Navy sea captain, and lived for a time in Romilly Road, Barry, Glamorgan. His early introduction to the stage was from his interest in making model theatres and stage scenery. He studied at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, during which period he shared a flat with classmate Alan Bates. He made his film debut in the 1957 remake of The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
In 1960, Orson Welles selected Baxter to portray Prince Hal in his stage production Chimes at Midnight, which combined portions of the Shakespearean plays Henry IV, Part I, Henry IV, Part II, Henry V, Richard II, and The Merry Wives of Windsor and brought the comic figure of Falstaff to the forefront of a primarily tragic tale. Baxter repeated his performance in the 1965 film version. Additional film credits include Ash Wednesday and Killing Time.
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Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Charles Branagh (/ˈbrænə/ BRAN-ə; born 10 December 1960) is an actor and film director from Northern Ireland. He is best known for directing and starring in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays including Henry V (1989) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Director), Much Ado About Nothing (1993), Othello, Hamlet (1996) (for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay), Love's Labour's Lost (2000), and As You Like It (2006).
He has also starred in numerous other films and television series including Fortunes of War (1987), Wild Wild West (1999), The Road to El Dorado (2000), Conspiracy (TV) (2001), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Warm Springs (TV) (2005), Valkyrie (2008), Wallander (TV series) (2008–present), and My Week with Marilyn (2011) as Laurence Olivier (Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor); and directed such notable films as Dead Again (1991) (also starring), Swan Song (1992) (Academy Award nominated for Best Live Action Short Film), Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994) (also starring), The Magic Flute (2006), Sleuth (2007), and the blockbuster action film Thor (2011).
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Kenneth MacMillan
Sir Kenneth MacMillan (11 December 1929 – 29 October 1992) was a British ballet dancer and choreographer. He was artistic director of the Royal Ballet in London between 1970 and 1977.
MacMillan was born at Dunfermline, Scotland. He grew up in Great Yarmouth, where he studied with Phyllis Adams. Later he won a scholarship to the Sadler's Wells Ballet School, where he studied for a year before, in 1946, joining Sadler's Wells Theatre Ballet, now known as Birmingham Royal Ballet. Whilst studying, he met and gained the support of Ninette de Valois, something he was to enjoy wholeheartedly for the rest of his life. In 1948 he moved to the Sadler's Wells Ballet, but returned to the Theatre Ballet four years later.
MacMillan began choreographing for the company's choreographic group and two promising early works, Somnambulism (1953) and Laiderette (1954) led de Valois to commission a work from the 25-year-old MacMillan. Danses concertantes was first produced in January 1955. He continued to dance, but gradually gave it up in favour of his true vocation. A string of successful works followed including Solitaire (1956), The Burrow (1958), Le baiser de la fée and The Invitation (1960), The Rite of Spring (1962), La Création du monde (1964) The Song of the Earth and his first full-length work, Romeo and Juliet (1965). The year he choreographed Romeo and Juliet, which has become one of his best-loved pieces, he was appointed resident choreographer at The Royal Ballet.
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Kenneth More
Kenneth Gilbert More CBE (20 September 1914 – 12 July 1982) was a highly successful English film actor during the post-World War II era and starred in many feature films, often in the role of an archetypal carefree and happy-go-lucky middle-class gentleman. As More himself described it, "I seem fated to be either the stiff-upper-lip war hero or the hearty back-slapping idiot".
Kenneth More was born in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, the only son of Charles Gilbert More, a Royal Naval Air Service pilot, and Edith Winifred Watkins, the daughter of a Cardiff solicitor. He was educated at Victoria College, Jersey. He spent part of his childhood in the Channel Islands, where his father was general manager of the Jersey Eastern Railway. After he left school, he followed the family tradition by training as a civil engineer. He gave up his training and worked for a while in Sainsbury's.
When More was 17 his father died, and he applied to join the RAF, but failed the medical test for equilibrium. He went to Canada, intending to work as a fur trapper, but was sent back for lacking immigration papers.
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Kevin Kline
Kevin Delaney Kline (born October 24, 1947) is an American stage and film actor. An Academy Award winner for his supporting role in the comedy hit Fish Called Wanda, AA Fish Called Wanda, he also won two Tony Awards and was nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, two BAFTA Awards and an Emmy Award.
Kline was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Peggy (née Kirk) and Robert Joseph Kline. His father was a classical music lover and an amateur opera singer who owned and operated The Record Bar, a record store in St. Louis that opened in the early '40s, and sold toys during the '60s and '70s; his father's family also owned Kline's Inc., a department store chain. Kline has described his mother as the "dramatic theatrical character in our family." Kline's father was Jewish, from a family that had emigrated from Germany; Kline's mother was of Irish descent, the daughter of an emigrant from County Louth. Kline was raised in his mother's Catholic religion (his father had become an agnostic). He has three siblings, Alex, Christopher, and Kate.
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Kevin Spacey
Kevin Spacey, CBE (born Kevin Spacey Fowler; July 26, 1959) is an American actor, director, screenwriter, producer, and crooner. He grew up in California, and began his career as a stage actor during the 1980s, before being cast in supporting roles in film and television. He gained critical acclaim in the early 1990s, culminating in his first Academy Award for The Usual Suspects (Best Supporting Actor), followed by a Best Actor Academy Award win for American Beauty (1999). His other starring roles in Hollywood include Seven, L.A. Confidential, Pay It Forward, K-PAX, and Superman Returns in a career which has earned him several Emmy and Golden Globe nominations. Since 2003, he has been artistic director of the Old Vic theatre in London.
Spacey was born in South Orange, New Jersey, the son of Kathleen Ann (née Knutson; December 5, 1931 – March 19, 2003), a secretary, and Thomas Geoffrey Fowler (June 4, 1924 – December 24, 1992), a technical writer and data consultant. He has two older siblings: a sister, Julie, and a brother, Randy. He attended Northridge Military Academy, Canoga Park High School (in tenth and eleventh grades), and then Chatsworth High School in Chatsworth, Los Angeles, where he graduated valedictorian of his class. At Chatsworth High, he starred in the school's senior production of The Sound of Music, playing the part of Captain Georg von Trapp, opposite Mare Winningham's character, Maria.
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Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM ( /ˈlɒrəns ɵˈlɪvi.eɪ/; 22 May 1907 – 11 July 1989) was an English actor, director, and producer. One of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century, he was the youngest actor to be knighted and the first to be elevated to the peerage. He married three times, to actresses Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright. Actor Spencer Tracy said that Olivier was 'the greatest actor in the English-speaking world'.
Olivier played a wide variety of roles on stage and screen from Greek tragedy, Shakespeare and Restoration comedy to modern American and British drama. He was the first artistic director of the National Theatre of Great Britain and its main stage is named in his honour. He is regarded by some to be the greatest actor of the 20th century, in the same category as David Garrick, Richard Burbage, Edmund Kean and Henry Irving in their own centuries. Olivier's AMPAS acknowledgments are considerable: twelve Oscar nominations, with two awards (for Best Actor and Best Picture for the 1948 film Hamlet), plus two honorary awards including a statuette and certificate. He was also awarded five Emmy awards from the nine nominations he received. Additionally, he was a three-time Golden Globe and BAFTA winner.
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Lewis Gielgud
Lewis Evelyn Gielgud, MBE (11 June 1894 – 25 February 1953, Paris) was a British scholar, writer, intelligence officer and humanitarian worker.
Lewis was the eldest son of Kate Terry and Frank Gielgud, and an elder brother to the broadcaster Val Gielgud and the actor John Gielgud. He attended Eton College as a King's Scholar and then studied at Magdalen College, Oxford as an exhibitioner in 1912 and a classical demy in 1913. On the outbreak of the First World War he became an officer in the 6th Battalion, The King's Shropshire Light Infantry, but left active service after being wounded in 1915. He spent the rest of the war with the War Office (1916–17) and British Military Mission in Paris (1917–19).
After the war he joined the staff of the International League of Red Cross Societies, rising to Under-Secretary General in 1927 and marrying Zita Gordon in 1937 (they had only one child, a daughter). He travelled far and wide for the organisation, organising international Red Cross conferences and giving lectures and broadcasts for them, but resigned from the organisation on the outbreak of the Second World War. He was given another army commission in 1940, serving in the War Office again and then being transferred to the Intelligence Corps (being promoted to his final rank of Lieutenant-Colonel in the latter in 1942). Released from the army in 1944, he returned to the Red Cross in 1945 as their sub-commissioner in Paris.
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Lillian Gish
Lillian Diana Gish (October 14, 1893 – February 27, 1993) was an American stage, screen and television actress whose film acting career spanned 75 years, from 1912 to 1987. She was called "The First Lady of American Cinema".
She was a prominent film star of the 1910s and 1920s, particularly associated with the films of director D.W. Griffith, including her leading role in Griffith's seminal Birth of a Nation (1915). Her sound-era film appearances were sporadic, but included memorable roles in the controversial western Duel in the Sun (1946) and the offbeat thriller Night of the Hunter (1955). She did considerable television work from the early 1950s into the 1980s, and closed her career playing, for the first time, opposite Bette Davis in the 1987 film The Whales of August.
The American Film Institute (AFI) named Gish 17th among the greatest female stars of all time. She was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 1971, and in 1984 she received an AFI Life Achievement Award.
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Liza Minnelli
Liza May Minnelli (born March 12, 1946) is an American actress and singer. She is the daughter of singer and actress Judy Garland and film director Vincente Minnelli.
Already established as a nightclub singer and musical theatre actress, she first attracted critical acclaim for her dramatic performances in the movies The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon (1970); Minnelli then rose to international stardom for her appearance as Sally Bowles in the 1972 film version of the Broadway musical Cabaret, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. She later made a great star turn in Arthur (1981), co-starring with Dudley Moore (in the title role) and Sir John Gielgud, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor as Arthur's snobbish but loveable butler.
While film projects such as Lucky Lady, A Matter of Time and New York, New York were less favorably received than her stage roles, Minnelli became one of the most versatile, highly regarded and best-selling entertainers in television, beginning with Liza with a Z in 1972, and on stage in the Broadway productions of Flora the Red Menace, The Act and The Rink. Minnelli also toured internationally and did shows such as Liza Minnelli: At Carnegie Hall, Frank, Liza & Sammy: The Ultimate Event, and Liza Live from Radio City Music Hall.
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Luigi Pirandello
Luigi Pirandello (Italian pronunciation: [luˈiːdʒi piranˈdɛllo]; 28 June 1867 – 10 December 1936) was an Italian dramatist, novelist, and short story writer awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1934, for his "bold and brilliant renovation of the drama and the stage". Pirandello's works include novels, hundreds of short stories, and about 40 plays, some of which are written in Sicilian. Pirandello's tragic farces are often seen as forerunners for Theatre of the Absurd.
Pirandello was born into an upper-class family in a village with the curious name of Kaos (Chaos), a poor suburb of Girgenti (Agrigento, a town in southern Sicily). His father, Stefano, belonged to a wealthy family involved in the sulphur industry and his mother, Caterina Ricci Gramitto, was also of a well-to-do background, descending from a family of the bourgeois professional class of Agrigento. Both families, the Pirandellos and the Ricci Gramittos, were ferociously anti-Bourbon and actively participated in the struggle for unification and democracy ("Il Risorgimento"). Stefano participated in the famous Expedition of the Thousand, later following Garibaldi all the way to the battle of Aspromonte and Caterina, who had hardly reached the age of thirteen, was forced to accompany her father to Malta, where he had been sent into exile by the Bourbon monarchy. But the open participation in the Garibaldian cause and the strong sense of idealism of those early years were quickly transformed, above all in Caterina, into an angry and bitter disappointment with the new reality created by the unification. Pirandello would eventually assimilate this sense of betrayal and resentment and express it in several of his poems and in his novel The Old and the Young. It is also probable that this climate of disillusion inculcated in the young Luigi the sense of disproportion between ideals and reality which is recognizable in his essay on humorism (L'Umorismo).
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Maina Gielgud
Maina Gielgud (born London; 14 January 1945) is a former British ballet dancer and a veteran ballet administrator. She was artistic director of the Australian Ballet from 1983 to 1996 and is that company's longest serving director to date. She had a twenty year career as a dancer in Europe and the United Kingdom. Gielgud directed the Royal Danish Ballet between 1997 and 1999. Until 2005, she held the artistic associate position at the Houston Ballet. She is a niece of actor John Gielgud.
From 1952-1955, Gielgud trained in London and Paris with such artists as George Gontcharov, Olga Preobrajenska, Tamara Karsavina, Lydia Kyasht, Nadine Nicolaeva Legat, Stanislas Idzikovski and Rachel Cameron. From 1956-1961, Gielgud trained in Cannes, Monte Carlo and Paris with such artists as Julie Sedova, Lubov Egorova, Victor Gsovski, Mischa Reznikov, Paul Goube, Rosella Hightower and Marika Besobrasova. From 1961-1962 she danced in the corps de ballet of the Ballet de Roland Petit. In 1962 she was a member of the corps de ballet of the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas before dancing as a soloist in 1962 with the Ballet de l'Etoile de Milorad Miskovitch. In 1963 she was a soloist for the Hommage au Marquis de Cuevas before joining the Grand Ballet Classique de France as Première Danseuse until 1967. Until 1971 she was the principal artist at the Ballet du XXème Siècle Maurice Béjart. For two years she was the principal artist at the Staatsoper Ballet Berlin. She then joined the London Festival Ballet until 1976. She became a principal artist with the Sadlers Wells Royal Ballet until 1978. In the years 1975-1981 she was the guest artist with the following companies:
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Margaret Harris
Margaret Frances Harris (28 May 1904 – 10 May 2000) was an English theatre and opera costume and scenic designer.
Harris was born in Hayes, Kent, the fourth child and second daughter of William Birkbeck Harris, a Lloyds Insurance clerk, and his wife Kathleen Marion, née Carey. With her older sister Sophie Harris she studied at The Chelsea Illustrators Studio in London in the late 1920s. A fellow student was Elizabeth Montgomery Wilmot, and the three formed a theatre design partnership known as Motley Theatre Design Group.
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Marion Terry
Marion Bessie Terry (13 October 1853 – 21 August 1930) was an English actress. In a career spanning half a century, she played leading roles in more than 125 plays. Always in the shadow of her more famous sister Ellen, Terry nevertheless achieved considerable success in the plays of W. S. Gilbert, Oscar Wilde, Henry James and others.
Terry was born in England, into a theatrical family. Her birth name was Mary Ann Bessy Terry, and she was nicknamed "Polly". Her parents, Benjamin (1818–1896), of Irish descent, and Sarah (née Ballard) (1819–1892), of Scottish ancestry, were comic actors in a touring company based in Portsmouth (where Sarah's father was a Wesleyan minister) and had eleven children. At least five of these became actors: Kate, Ellen, Marion, Florence and Fred. Two other children, George and Charles, were connected with theatre management.
Terry's sister Kate was a very successful actress until her marriage and retirement from the stage in 1867, and her sister Ellen became the greatest Shakespearean actress of her time. Her great nephew (Kate's grandson), Sir John Gielgud, became one of the twentieth century's most respected actors. Terry attended a boarding-school for girls at Sunnyside, Kingston upon Thames, together with her favourite sister, Florence.
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Mark Isham
Mark Ware Isham (born September 7, 1951) is an American trumpeter, synthesist, and film composer. He works in a variety of genres, including jazz, electronic, and film. He currently composed the score of the TV series Once Upon a Time.
Isham was born in New York City, New York, the son of Patricia (née Hammond), a violinist, and Howard Fuller Isham, a professor of humanities.
Isham is a Scientologist. He is married to Donna Isham.
With Art Lande
With David Torn
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Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an American movie star and political activist. "Unchallenged as the most important actor in modern American Cinema" according to the St. James Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Brando was one of only three professional actors, along with Charlie Chaplin and Marilyn Monroe, named by Time magazine as one of its 100 Persons of the Century in 1999.
Brando had a significant impact on film acting, and was the foremost example of the "method" acting style. While he became notorious for his "mumbling" diction and exuding a raw animal magnetism, his mercurial performances were nonetheless highly regarded, and he is widely considered as one of the greatest and most influential actors of the 20th century. Director Martin Scorsese said of him, "He is the marker. There's 'before Brando' and 'after Brando'." Actor Jack Nicholson once said, "When Marlon dies, everybody moves up one." He was ranked by the American Film Institute as the fourth greatest screen legend among male movie stars.
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Martin Landau
Martin Landau (born June 20, 1928) is an American film and television actor. Landau began his career in the 1950s. His early films include a supporting role in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959). He played continuing roles in the television series Mission: Impossible (for which he received several Emmy Award nominations) and Space:1999. He received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture and his first nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his work in Tucker: The Man and His Dream, and was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). His performance in the supporting role of Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood (1994) earned him the Academy Award, Screen Actors Guild Award and a Golden Globe. He continues to perform in film and television and heads the Hollywood branch of the Actors Studio.
Landau was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Selma and Morris Landau. His family was Jewish, and his father, an Austrian-born machinist, scrambled to rescue relatives from the Nazis. He attended James Madison High School and The Pratt Institute before finding full-time work as a cartoonist.
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Martita Hunt
Martita Hunt (30 January 1900 – 13 June 1969) was an English theatre and film actress.
Hunt was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina on 30 January 1900 to British parents Alfred and Marta Hunt (née Burnett). She spent the first ten years of her life in Argentina before she returned with her parents to England to attend Queenwood Ladies' College, in Eastbourne, and then to train as an actress under Dame Genevieve Ward and Lady Benson.
Hunt began her acting career in repertory theatre at Liverpool before moving to London. She first appeared there in the Stage Society's production of Ernst Toller's The Machine Wreckers at the Kingsway Theatre in May 1923. From 1923-9 she appeared as the Principessa della Cercola in W. Somerset Maugham's Our Betters (Globe, 1924) and as Mrs. Linden in Ibsen's A Doll's House (Playhouse, 1925) in the West End, along with engagements at club theatres such as the Q Theatre and the Arts Theatre and a short 1926 Chekhov season at the small Barnes Theatre under Victor Komisarjevsky (playing Charlotta Ivanovna, in The Cherry Orchard and Olga in Three Sisters).
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McLean Stevenson
Edgar McLean Stevenson, Jr. (November 14, 1927 – February 15, 1996), better known as McLean Stevenson, was an American actor most recognized for his role as Lt. Colonel Henry Blake on the TV series M*A*S*H. He was also recognized for his role as Michael Nicholson on The Doris Day Show.
Stevenson was born in Normal, Illinois. He was the great-grandson of William Stevenson, brother of Vice President Adlai E. Stevenson, making him a second cousin once removed of presidential candidate Adlai E. Stevenson II. He was also the brother of actress Ann Whitney. His father, Edgar, was a cardiologist.
He attended Lake Forest Academy and later joined the Navy. After his service, he attended Northwestern University, where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in theater arts and was a proud and well-liked Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji) fraternity brother. Afterwards he worked at a radio station, played a clown on a live TV show in Dallas, became an assistant director at Northwestern and sold medical supplies and insurance. He also worked as a press secretary for his cousin in the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. He formed the "Young Democrats for Stevenson".[citation needed]
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Michael Caine
Sir Michael Caine, CBE (born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite; 14 March 1933) is an English actor.
Caine is one of two actors nominated for an Academy Award for acting in every decade from the 1960s to 2000s, the other one being Jack Nicholson. In 2000, Caine was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in recognition of his contribution to cinema.
Caine was born in St Olave's Hospital, Rotherhithe, Southwark in South East London, the son of Ellen Frances Marie (née Burchell; 1900-1989), a cook and charwoman, and Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, a fish market porter. His father was of English, Irish, and, reportedly, Irish Traveller ancestry. Caine was brought up in his mother's Protestant religion (his father was Catholic).
Caine grew up in Southwark, South London, and during the Second World War he was evacuated to North Runcton near King's Lynn in Norfolk. After the war, when his father was demobilised, the family was rehoused by the council in Marshall Gardens at the Elephant and Castle in a pre-fabricated house made in Canada, as much of London's housing stock had been damaged during the Blitz in 1940-41.
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Michael Korda
Michael Korda (born 8 October 1933) is a writer and novelist who was editor-in-Chief of Simon & Schuster in New York City.
Born in London, England, United Kingdom, Michael Korda is the son of English actress Gertrude Musgrove and artist and film production designer Vincent Korda and the nephew of Hungarian-born film magnate Sir Alexander Korda and brother Zoltan. Korda grew up in England but received part of his education in France where his father had worked with film director Marcel Pagnol. He was schooled at the private Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland and read History at Magdalen College, Oxford. He served in the Royal Air Force.
While in his early twenties, he moved to New York City where he was employed by playwright Sidney Kingsley as a research assistant. In 1958 he joined the book publishing firm, Simon & Schuster, starting as an assistant editor, which included the task of reading "slush pile" manuscripts. He became Editor-in-Chief of the company and was a major figure in the book industry, publishing numerous works by high-profile writers and personalities such as William L. Shirer, Will and Ariel Durant, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. However, from a commercial point of view, Korda is best noted for pioneering best-selling novels by authors such as Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins that in the 1960s were considered very daring.
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Michael Moriarty
Michael Moriarty (born April 5, 1941) is an American-Canadian actor of stage and screen, and a jazz musician. He played Benjamin Stone for four seasons in the TV series Law & Order.
Moriarty, an Irish American was born in Detroit, Michigan the son of Elinor (married and maiden names|née Paul) and George Moriarty, a police sergeant. His grandfather, George Moriarty, was a third baseman, umpire and manager in the major leagues for nearly 40 years.
Moriarty attended middle school at Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills before transferring to the University of Detroit Jesuit High School for high school. He then matriculated at Dartmouth College in the class of 1963, where he was a theatre college major. After receiving his degree, he left for London, England, where he enrolled in the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, after receiving a Fulbright Scholarship.
In 1973, Moriarty was cast as the egocentric Henry Wiggen in Bang the Drum Slowly, a film about the unlikely friendship between two baseball teammates – the second being Robert De Niro, a slow thinking catcher who becomes terminally ill. In the same year, Moriarty starred in a TV movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie with Katharine Hepburn. Coincidentally, the film also featured Sam Waterston, who later replaced Moriarty as the Executive Assistant District Attorney on Law & Order. Moriarty's role in Menagerie (as "Jim," the Gentleman Caller; Waterston played the son "Tom") won him an Emmy Award for Best Supporting Actor of the Year. In 1974, Moriarty starred as rookie detective Bo Lockley in the acclaimed gritty police drama Report to the Commissioner.
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Michael Palin
Michael Edward Palin, CBE, PRGS (born 5 May 1943) is an English comedian, actor, writer and television presenter best known for being one of the members of the comedy group Monty Python and for his travel documentaries. Palin wrote most of his comedic material with Terry Jones. Before Monty Python, they had worked on other shows such as the Ken Dodd Show, The Frost Report and Do Not Adjust Your Set. Palin appeared in some of the most famous Python sketches, including "Argument Clinic," "Dead Parrot," "The Lumberjack Song," "The Spanish Inquisition," and "The Fish-Slapping Dance."
Palin continued to work with Jones after Python, co-writing Ripping Yarns. He has also appeared in several films directed by fellow Python Terry Gilliam and made notable appearances in other films such as A Fish Called Wanda, for which he won the BAFTA Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. In a 2005 poll to find The Comedians' Comedian, he was voted the 30th favourite by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.
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Michael Redgrave
Sir Michael Scudamore Redgrave, CBE (20 March 1908 – 21 March 1985) was an English stage and film actor, director, manager and author.
Redgrave was born in Bristol, Gloucestershire, England, the son of the silent film actor Roy Redgrave and the actress Margaret Scudamore. He never knew his father, who left when Michael was only six months old to pursue a career in Australia. His mother subsequently married Captain James Anderson, a tea planter, but Redgrave greatly disliked his stepfather.
He studied at Clifton College and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a schoolmaster at Cranleigh School in Surrey before becoming an actor in 1934. There he directed the boys in Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest, but managed to play all the leading roles himself. The 'Redgrave Room' at the school was later named after him. In the new Guildford School of Acting building which opened in January 2010, there is the Sir Michael Redgrave studio.
Redgrave made his first professional appearance at the Liverpool Playhouse on 30 August 1934 as Roy Darwin in Counsellor-at-Law (by Elmer Rice), then spent two years with its Liverpool Repertory Company where he met his future wife Rachel Kempson. They married on 18 July 1935.
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Michael Saint-Denis
Michel Saint-Denis (September 13, 1897 in Beauvais - July 31, 1971 in London), dit Jacques Duchesne, was a French actor, theater director, and drama theorist whose ideas on actor training have had a profound influence on the development of European theater from the 1930s on.
Michel Saint-Denis was born in Beauvais, France, the nephew of Jacques Copeau, who had founded the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier in 1913. St-Denis was exposed to theater early in his life. He joined Copeau's troupe in 1919, after their return from New York, where they had performed for two years. Saint-Denis was greatly influenced by Copeau's approach to theater taught at his Ecole du Vieux-Colombier, which embraced not only the play on stage but also the actor training itself. He soon became Copeau's right hand man, like Charles Dullin or Louis Jouvet before him. Together with other members of the troupe of the Vieux-Colombier, he followed his uncle to Burgundy in 1924, where they formed a new troupe that would become famous as les Copiaus.
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Mickey Rooney
Mickey Rooney (born Joseph Yule, Jr.; (September 23, 1920) is an American film actor and entertainer whose film, television, and stage appearances span nearly his entire lifetime. He has received multiple awards, including a Juvenile Academy Award, an Honorary Academy Award, two Golden Globes and an Emmy Award. Working as a performer since he was a child, he was a superstar as a teenager for the films in which he played Andy Hardy, and he has had one of the longest careers of any actor, to date spanning 90 years actively making films in ten decades, from 1920s to 2010s. For a younger generation of fans, he gained international fame for his leading role as Henry Dailey in The Family Channel's The Adventures of the Black Stallion, as well as the film itself.
Rooney was born Joseph Yule, Jr. in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Joseph Yule, was from Scotland, and his mother, Nellie W. (née Carter), was from Kansas City, Missouri. Both of his parents were in vaudeville, appearing in a Brooklyn production of A Gaiety Girl when Joseph, Jr. was born. He began performing at the age of 17 months as part of his parents' routine, wearing a specially tailored tuxedo.
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Mike Nichols
Mike Nichols (born Michael Igor Peschkowsky; November 6, 1931) is a German-born American television, stage and film director, writer, producer and comedian. He began his career in the 1950s as one half of the comedy duo Nichols and May, along with Elaine May. In 1968 he won the Academy Award for Best Director for the film The Graduate. His other noteworthy films include Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge, Working Girl, Closer and the TV mini-series Angels in America. He also staged the original theatrical productions of Barefoot in the Park, Luv, The Odd Couple and Spamalot.
Nichols is one of a small group of people who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Award. His other honors include the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010.
Mike Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany, the son of Brigitte (née Landauer) and Paul Peschkowsky, a physician. His father was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Russian Jewish immigrant family that had been wealthy and lived in Siberia, leaving after the Russian Revolution and settling in Germany around 1920. His mother's family were German Jews. His maternal grandparents were anarchist Gustav Landauer and author Hedwig Lachmann. Nichols is a third cousin twice removed of scientist Albert Einstein, through Nichols' mother. He moved to the United States to flee the Nazis on April 28, 1939. His father, who had changed his name to Paul Nichols, had successfully set up a medical practice in Manhattan and the family lived near Central Park. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944 and attended public elementary school in Manhattan (PS 87). After graduating from Walden High School, Nichols briefly attended New York University before dropping out. In 1950, he enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of Chicago.
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Ninette de Valois
Dame Ninette de Valois, OM, CH, DBE, FRAD, FISTD (6 June 1898 – 8 March 2001) was an Irish-born British dancer, teacher, choreographer and director of classical ballet. Most notably, she danced professionally with Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, later establishing The Royal Ballet, one of the foremost ballet companies of the 20th century and one of the leading ballet companies in the world today. She also established the Birmingham Royal Ballet and Royal Ballet School. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of ballet and as the 'godmother' of English ballet.
Ninette de Valois was born Edris Stannus on 6 June 1898, near the town of Blessington, County Wicklow, Ireland. She was the second daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Stannus (DSO), a British army officer, and Lillith Graydon-Smith, a distinguished glassmaker. She moved to England in 1905, where she lived with her grandmother in Kent.
De Valois started attending ballet lessons in 1908 at the age of 10. At the age of 13, she began her professional training at the Lila Field Academy for Children. It was at this time that she legally changed her name to Ninette de Valois and made her professional debut as a principal dancer in pantomime at the Lyceum Theatre in the West End. In 1919, at the age of 21, she was appointed principal dancer of the Beecham Opera, which was then the resident opera company at the Royal Opera House. She continued to study ballet with notable teachers, including Edouard Espinosa, Enrico Cecchetti and Nicholas Legat.
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Noel Willman
Noel Willman (August 4, 1918 in Derry, Ireland - December 14, 1988 in New York) was a Irish actor and theatre director of English descent..
His films included Androcles and the Lion (1952), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Across the Bridge (1957), Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), The Kiss of the Vampire (1963), Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Reptile (1966) and The Odessa File (1974).
He was also a theatre director and actor, and won a Tony Award in 1962 for his direction of the original Broadway production of Robert Bolt's A Man For All Seasons. According to Bolt, he was instrumental in many aspects of the play's development, including the casting of Paul Scofield as Thomas More. He was also nominated in 1966 for the same category for James Goldman's The Lion in Winter, and he directed Katharine Hepburn and Christopher Reeve in A Matter of Gravity in 1976. He frequently collaborated with Bolt, also directing The Tiger and the Horse and Gentle Jack (and appearing in Zhivago, which Bolt scripted). One of his most famous theatrical roles was opposite Alec Guinness in the stage production of Bridget Boland's The Prisoner, later made into a film with Guinness and Jack Hawkins.
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Norman Fell
Norman Fell (March 24, 1924 – December 14, 1998), born Norman Noah Feld, was an American actor of film and television, most famous for his role as landlord Mr. Roper on the sitcom Three's Company and its spin-off, The Ropers.
Fell was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a Jewish family, and went to Central High School of Philadelphia. In college he studied drama at Temple University after serving as a tail gunner in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.
Though Fell mostly acted on television, he also had small character roles in several motion pictures including the original Ocean's 11, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, PT 109, The Graduate (in which he played a landlord), Bullitt, and Catch-22 as Sergeant Towser. He appeared alongside Ronald Reagan in Reagan's last film, The Killers.
From 1977-1979 he portrayed the main characters' hardnosed landlord Stanley Roper on the hit TV comedy Three's Company. He continued to play the character as the co-lead with Audra Lindley as his wife Helen on The Ropers, a spin-off which lasted a year in a less favorable time slot.
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Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward (16 December 1899 – 26 March 1973) was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".
Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy in London as a child, making his professional stage début at the age of eleven. As a teenager he was introduced into the high society in which most of his plays would be set. Coward achieved enduring success as a playwright, publishing more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theatre repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theatre works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward's stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works.
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Orson Welles
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer and producer who worked extensively in theater, radio and film. He is best remembered for his innovative work in all three media, most notably Caesar (1937), a groundbreaking Broadway adaption of Julius Caesar and the debut of the Mercury Theatre; The War of the Worlds (1938), the most famous broadcast in the history of radio; and Citizen Kane (1941), which many critics and scholars name as the best film of all time.
After directing a number of high-profile theatrical productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds performed for the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was reported to have caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to instant notoriety.
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Patrick McGoohan
Patrick Joseph McGoohan (March 19, 1928 – January 13, 2009) was an American-born actor, brought up in Ireland and England, where he established an extensive stage and film career, with his most notable roles in the 1960s television series Danger Man (renamed Secret Agent when exported to the US), and The Prisoner, which he co-created. McGoohan wrote and directed several episodes of The Prisoner himself, occasionally using the pseudonyms Joseph Serf and Paddy Fitz. Later in his career he moved to America and subsequently appeared as the killer in four Columbo episodes, twice winning an Emmy. He was featured in David Cronenberg's Scanners (1981), and played King Edward I aka Longshanks in Mel Gibson's Braveheart (1995).
McGoohan was born in Astoria, Queens, New York City, to Thomas McGoohan and Rose Fitzpatrick, who were living in the United States after emigrating from Ireland to look for work. He was brought up Roman Catholic. Shortly after he was born, McGoohan's parents moved back to Mullaghmore, County Leitrim, Ireland, and, seven years later, they moved to Sheffield, England. McGoohan attended St Vincent's school in Sheffield, but following the outbreak of World War II he was evacuated to Loughborough, Leicestershire. There he attended Ratcliffe College, where he excelled in mathematics and boxing.
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Paul Le Mat
Paul Le Mat (born September 22, 1945) is an American actor who first came to prominence in the 1973 film American Graffiti, which won him the Golden Globe Award for New Star Of The Year - Actor.
Le Mat was born to Matthew (1914–1963) and Paula Le Mat (1912–1990). He is of French, Scottish, English, Cuban, and Irish descent. He graduated from Newport Harbor High School in 1963, and, although he never received a degree, he attended various colleges in California. A Vietnam veteran, Le Mat was awarded the National Defense Medal and Vietnam Service Medal. He is married to Suzanne de Passe and they have three daughters.
Le Mat starred in the pilot episode of Firehouse in 1973. The same year, he appeared in American Graffiti, a coming of age film about a group of friends in Modesto, California in the early 1960s. He played John Milner - a role that would earn him his first Golden Globe Award. The film went on to receive universal acclaim, and was a box office hit. Le Mat also starred in Floyd Mutrux's 1975 crime spree film Aloha, Bobby and Rose. In 1977, he starred in Jonathan Demme's acclaimed comedy, Handle with Care, which was later re-titled Citizens Band, which saw him reunite with his American Graffiti co-star Candy Clark. Le Mat would reunite with Demme for 1980's Melvin and Howard, in which he played the titular role of Melvin Dummar. The film was based upon the true story of a gas station attendant who claimed to be an heir of eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and won two Academy Awards. It was met with rave reviews from Pauline Kael and other top film critics, and Le Mat was nominated for a Golden Globe Award. In 1979, Le Mat reprised his role of John Milner in More American Graffiti.
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Paul Scofield
David Paul Scofield, CH, CBE (21 January 1922 – 19 March 2008), better known as Paul Scofield, was an English actor of stage and screen. Noted for his distinctive voice and delivery, Scofield received an Academy Award and a BAFTA Award for his performance as Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons, a reprise of the role he played in the stage version at the West End and on Broadway for which he received a Tony Award.
Scofield was born in Birmingham, England, the son of Mary and Edward Harry Scofield. When Scofield was a few weeks old, his family moved to Hurstpierpoint, Sussex, where his father served as the headmaster at the Hurstpierpoint Church of England School. At the age of 12 he began attending the Varndean Secondary School in Brighton, where he took various roles in school plays.
Scofield began his stage career in 1940 with a debut performance in Desire Under the Elms at the Westminster Theatre, and was soon being compared to Laurence Olivier. He played at the Old Rep in Birmingham. From there he went to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford, where he starred in Walter Nugent Monck's 1947 revival of Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
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Peggy Ashcroft
Dame Peggy Ashcroft, DBE (22 December 1907 – 14 June 1991) was an English actress.
Born as Edith Margaret Emily Ashcroft in Croydon, Surrey, Ashcroft attended the Woodford School, Croydon and the Central School of Speech and Drama. A prolific stage actress from a young age, she first gained notoriety playing Naemi in Jew Suss in 1929, and Desdemona opposite Paul Robeson's Othello two years later, during which time the two had a brief affair.
Stardom came in 1934 when she played Juliet in a legendary production of Romeo and Juliet, at the New Theatre, in which Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud alternated in the roles of Romeo and Mercutio. She and Gielgud would later be acclaimed as Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, which they played together a number of times, including a London engagement and European tour for the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1955 (she also played Cordelia to his King Lear during that tour). When she first played Beatrice with him in 1950, Gielgud found her performance "a revelation - an impish, rather tactless girl with a curious resemblance to Bea Lillie," while a teenage Peter Hall observed in her "English containment and decency, contrasted with a wild passion." She stayed at the top of the British theatrical profession throughout her career, with some of the highlights Three Sisters (1937) in which she played Irina, The Heiress (1949), Antony and Cleopatra (1953), As You Like It and Cymbeline (as Imogen) (1957), The Taming of the Shrew (1960), and The War of the Roses, the Royal Shakespeare Company's massive landmark compendium of the three Henry VI plays and Richard III, directed by Peter Hall for the RSC in 1963. Her last appearances for the RSC were as the Countess of Rousillon in Trevor Nunn's 1981 All's Well That Ends Well, a "perfect…performance" according to Financial Times critic Bertram Young, and in a revival of The Hollow Crown for a gala performance at The Swan on 22 June 1986.
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PETA
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) (stylized PeTA) is an American animal rights organization based in Norfolk, Virginia, and led by Ingrid Newkirk, its international president. A non-profit corporation with 300 employees and two million members and supporters, it claims to be the largest animal rights group in the world. Its slogan is "animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment."
Founded in March 1980 by Newkirk and fellow animal rights activist Alex Pacheco, the organization first caught the public's attention in the summer of 1981 during what became known as the Silver Spring monkeys case, a widely publicized dispute about experiments conducted on 17 macaque monkeys inside the Institute of Behavioral Research in Silver Spring, Maryland. The case lasted ten years, involved the only police raid on an animal laboratory in the United States, triggered an amendment in 1985 to that country's Animal Welfare Act, and established PETA as an internationally known organization. Since then, in its campaigns and undercover investigations, it has focused on four core issues—opposition to factory farming, fur farming, animal testing, and animals in entertainment—though it also campaigns against fishing, the killing of animals regarded as pests, the keeping of chained backyard dogs, cock fighting, dog fighting, and bullfighting.
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Peter Brook
Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH, CBE (born 21 March 1925) is an English theatre and film director and innovator, who has been based in France since the early 1970s.
Brook was born in London in March 1925, the son of Simon Brook and his wife Ida (Jansen), two Jewish immigrants. He was educated at Gresham's School and Magdalen College, Oxford.
He directed Dr Faustus, his first production, in 1943 at the Torch Theatre in London, followed at the Chanticleer Theatre in 1945 with a revival of The Infernal Machine. In 1947, he went to Stratford-upon-Avon as assistant director on Romeo and Juliet and Love's Labour's Lost. From 1947 to 1950, he was Director of Productions at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. His work there included a highly controversial staging of Strauss’ Salome with sets by Salvador Dalí and also an effective re-staging of Puccini’s La Boheme using sets dating from 1899. A proliferation of stage and screen work as producer and director followed.
In 1951, Brook married the actress Natasha Parry; the couple have a daughter.
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Peter Greenaway
Peter Greenaway, CBE (born 5 April 1942) is a British film director. His films are noted for the distinct influence of Renaissance and Baroque painting, and Flemish painting in particular. The scenic composition and illumination and the contrasts of costume and nudity, nature and architecture, furniture and people, sexual pleasure and painful death are common traits in his films.
Greenaway was born in Newport, Monmouthshire, Wales, to a teacher mother and a builder's merchant father. Greenaway's family left South Wales when he was three years old (they had moved there originally to avoid the Blitz) and settled in Essex, England. He attended Forest School in North-East London. At an early age Greenaway decided on becoming a painter. He became interested in European cinema, focusing first on the films of Ingmar Bergman, and then on the French nouvelle vague filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and, most especially, Alain Resnais.
In 1962, Greenaway began studies at Walthamstow College of Art, where a fellow student was musician Ian Dury (later cast in The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover). Greenaway trained as a muralist for three years; he made his first film, Death of Sentiment, a churchyard furniture essay filmed in four large London cemeteries. In 1965, he joined the Central Office of Information (COI), working there fifteen years as a film editor and director. In that time he created a filmography of experimental films, starting with Train (1966), footage of the last steam trains at Waterloo station, (situated behind the COI), edited to a musique concrète composition. Tree (1966), is a homage to the embattled tree growing in concrete outside the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank in London. By the 1970s he was confident and ambitious and made Vertical Features Remake and A Walk Through H. The former is an examination of various arithmetical editing structures, and the latter is a journey through the maps of a fictitious country.
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Peter Sellers
Richard Henry Sellers, CBE (8 September 1925 – 24 July 1980), known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor. Perhaps best known as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, he is also notable for playing three different characters in Dr. Strangelove, as Clare Quilty in Lolita, and as the TV-addicted man-child Chance the gardener in his penultimate film, Being There. Actress Bette Davis once remarked of him, "He isn't an actor—he's a chameleon."
Sellers rose to fame on the BBC Radio comedy series The Goon Show. His ability to speak in different accents (e.g., French, Indian, Italian, American, German, as well as British regional accents), along with his talent to portray a range of characters to comic effect, contributed to his success as a radio personality and screen actor and earned him national and international nominations and awards. Many of his characters became ingrained in public perception of his work. Sellers' private life was characterised by turmoil and crises, and included emotional problems and substance abuse. Sellers was married four times, and had three children from the first two marriages.
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Peter Strauss
Peter Strauss (born February 20, 1947) is an American television and movie actor, known for his roles in several television miniseries in the 1970s and 1980s.
Strauss was born in Croton-on-Hudson, New York to a Jewish family. His father, who immigrated from Germany, was a wine importer. Strauss graduated from the Hackley School in 1965 and Northwestern University in 1969.
He married actress Rachel Ticotin on December 31, 1998. He had been married twice before, with his second marriage producing two children.
Notably, he plays Abel Roznovski in Kane and Abel, the TV miniseries from Jeffrey Archer's book of the same title. He won an Emmy Award for his role on the 1979 made-for-television movie The Jericho Mile, and he starred in a television remake of the classic 1946 film Angel on My Shoulder in 1980. His other noted television miniseries credits include starring roles in Rich Man, Poor Man, its sequel Rich Man, Poor Man Book II, and Masada. Strauss plays Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. in the 1977 TV movie Young Joe, the Forgotten Kennedy.
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Poles
The Polish people, or Poles (Polish: Polacy [pɔˈlat͡sɨ]; singular: Polak), are a nation indigenous to Poland. They speak the Polish language, which belongs to the historical Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages of Central Europe. The Polish word for a Polish person is "Polak" (masculine) and "Polka" (feminine).
The preamble to the Constitution of the Republic of Poland defines the Polish nation as comprising all the citizens of Poland. Poland's inhabitants live in the following historic regions of the country: Wielkopolska, Małopolska, Mazovia, Pomerania, Warmia, Mazury, Podlasie, Kujawy and Silesia. A wide-ranging Polish diaspora exists throughout Europe (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Belarus, Lithuania and Ukraine), the Americas (the United States, Brazil and Argentina) and Australia. Chicago, in the United States, has the world's largest urban Polish population after Warsaw.
Over a thousand years ago, the Polans of Giecz, Gniezno and Poznań — an influential tribe in Wielkopolska — succeeded in uniting Lechitic tribes under what became the Piast dynasty, thus giving rise to the Polish state.
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Prince Hamlet
Prince Hamlet is a fictional character, the protagonist in Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet. He is the Prince of Denmark, nephew to the usurping Claudius and son of the previous King of Denmark, Old Hamlet. Throughout the play he struggles with whether, and how, to avenge the murder of his father, and struggles with his own sanity along the way. By the end of the tragedy, Hamlet has caused the deaths of Polonius, Laertes, Claudius and his two childhood friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He is also indirectly involved in the deaths of his love Ophelia (drowning) and of his mother Gertrude (poisoned by mistake). Hamlet himself is the final character to die in the play.
Perhaps the most straightforward view sees Hamlet as seeking truth in order to be certain that he is justified in carrying out the revenge called for by a ghost that claims to be the spirit of his father. The 1948 movie with Laurence Olivier in the title role is introduced by a voiceover: "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind."
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Professor Moriarty
Professor James Moriarty is the archenemy of Sherlock Holmes, a fictional detective created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Moriarty is a criminal mastermind whom Holmes describes as the "Napoleon of crime." Doyle lifted the phrase from a real Scotland Yard inspector who was referring to Adam Worth, one of the real life models of Moriarty. The character of Moriarty as Holmes's greatest enemy was introduced primarily as a narrative device to enable Conan Doyle to kill off Sherlock Holmes, and only featured directly in two of the Sherlock Holmes stories. However, in more recent derivative work he is often given a greater prominence and treated as Holmes's primary antagonist.
Professor Moriarty's first appearance and his ultimate end occurred in Doyle's story "The Final Problem," in which Holmes, on the verge of delivering a fatal blow to Moriarty's criminal ring, is forced to flee to continental Europe to escape Moriarty's retribution. The criminal mastermind follows, and the pursuit ends on top of the Reichenbach Falls, during which, both Holmes and Moriarty apparently fall to their deaths while locked in mortal combat. During this story, Moriarty is something of a Mafia Godfather: he protects nearly all of the criminals of England in exchange for their obedience and a share in their profits. Holmes, by his own account, was originally led to Moriarty by the suggestion that many of the crimes he perceived were not the spontaneous work of random criminals, but the machinations of a vast and subtle criminal ring.
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Ray McAnally
Ray McAnally (30 March 1926 – 15 June 1989) was an Irish actor famous for his performances in films such as The Mission, My Left Foot, and A Very British Coup.
Ray McAnally was born in Buncrana, a seaside town located on the Inishowen Peninsula of County Donegal, Ireland. The son of a bank manager, he was educated at St. Eunan's College in Letterkenny where he wrote, produced and staged a musical called 'Madame Screwball' at the age of 16. He entered a seminary at the age of 18. However, he left the seminary after a short time having decided that the priesthood was not his vocation. He joined the Abbey Theatre in 1947 where he met and married actress Ronnie Masterson. He was bilingual in English and Irish, and performed on stage in both languages.
The couple would later form Old Quay Productions and present an assortment of classic plays in the 1960s and 1970s. He made his theatre debut in 1962 with A Nice Bunch of Cheap Flowers and gave a well-received performance as George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opposite Constance Cummings, at the Piccadilly Theatre.
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Raúl Juliá
Raúl Rafael Juliá y Arcelay (March 9, 1940 – October 24, 1994) was a Puerto Rican actor.
Born in San Juan, he gained interest in acting while still in school. Upon completing his studies, Juliá decided to pursue a career in acting. After performing in the local scene for some time, he was convinced by entertainment personality Orson Bean to move and work in New York City. Juliá, who had been bilingual since his childhood, soon gained interest in Broadway and Off-Broadway plays. He performed in mobile projects, including the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre.
Juliá was eventually noticed by Joseph Papp, who offered him work in the New York Shakespeare Festival. After gaining notoriety, he received roles in two television series, Love of Life and Sesame Street. For his performance in Two Gentlemen of Verona, he received a nomination for the Tony Award and won a Drama Desk Award. Between 1974 and 1982, Juliá received Tony Award nominations for Where's Charley?, The Threepenny Opera and Nine. During the 1980s, he worked in several films, receiving nominations for the Golden Globe Awards, for his performance in Tempest, and Kiss of the Spider Woman, winning the National Board of Review Award for Best Actor for the latter.
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Richard Burton
Richard Burton, CBE (10 November 1925 – 5 August 1984) was a Welsh actor. He was nominated seven times for an Academy Award, six of which were for Best Actor in a Leading Role (without ever winning), and was a recipient of BAFTA, Golden Globe and Tony Awards for Best Actor. Although never trained as an actor, Burton was, at one time, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. He remains closely associated in the public consciousness with his second wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor; the couple's turbulent relationship was rarely out of the news.
Richard Burton was born Richard Walter Jenkins in the village of Pontrhydyfen, Neath Port Talbot, Wales. He grew up in a working class, Welsh-speaking household, the twelfth of thirteen children. His father, Richard Walter Jenkins, was a short, robust coal miner, a "twelve-pints-a-day man" who sometimes went off on drinking and gambling sprees for weeks. Burton later claimed, by family telling, that "He looked very much like me...That is, he was pockmarked, devious, and smiled a great deal when he was in trouble. He was, also, a man of extraordinary eloquence, tremendous passion, great violence."
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Richard Chamberlain
George Richard Chamberlain (born March 31, 1934) is an American stage and screen actor and singer, who became a teen idol in the title role of the television show Dr. Kildare (1961–1966).
Since then, he has appeared in several mini-series such as Shōgun (1980) and The Thorn Birds (1983), many successful films, and performed classical stage roles and worked in the musical theatre.
Chamberlain was born in 1934 in Beverly Hills, California, the son of Elsa Winnifred (née Matthews) and Charles Axiom Chamberlain, who was a salesman. Chamberlain's father was well known within Alcoholics Anonymous, having traveled for years speaking at A.A. conventions. In 1952, Richard Chamberlain graduated from Beverly Hills High School and later attended Pomona College (class of 1956).
Chamberlain co-founded a Los Angeles-based theatre group, Company of Angels, and began appearing in TV series in the 1950s. In 1961 he gained widespread fame as the young intern, Dr. Kildare, in the MGM television series of the same name. His singing ability also led to some hit singles in the early 1960s. One of them was the "Theme from Dr. Kildare" entitled "Three Stars Will Shine Tonight", which hit number 10 according to the Billboard Hot 100 Charts. Dr. Kildare ended in 1966, after which Chamberlain began performing on the theatre circuit. In 1966, he was cast opposite Mary Tyler Moore in the ill-fated Broadway musical Breakfast at Tiffany's, co-starring Priscilla Lopez, which, after an out-of-town tryout period, closed after only four previews. Decades later he returned to Broadway in revivals of My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music.[citation needed]
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Richard Kiley
Richard Paul Kiley (March 31, 1922 – March 5, 1999) was an American stage, television, and film actor. He is best known for his voice work, as narrator of various documentary series, and for having played Don Quixote in the original 1965 production of the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha. Kiley was the first to sing and record "The Impossible Dream", the hit song from the show. In the 1953 hit musical Kismet, he played the Caliph, and introduced the song "Stranger in Paradise". He won three Emmy Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and two Tony Awards during his career.
Kiley was born in Chicago, Illinois, and raised Roman Catholic. He graduated from Mt. Carmel High School in 1940, and after a year at Loyola University Chicago he left to study acting at Chicago's Barnum Dramatic School. In the late 40s, he performed in Chicago-area summer stock theaters with actors such as Alan Furlan. Following a stint in the Navy, he returned to Chicago working as an actor and announcer on radio before moving to New York City. In New York he studied singing with Ray Smolover.
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Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner ( /ˈvɑːɡnər/; German pronunciation: [ˈʁiçaʁt ˈvaːɡnɐ]; 22 May 1813 – 13 February 1883) was a German composer, conductor, theatre director and polemicist primarily known for his operas (or "music dramas", as he later called them). Wagner's compositions, particularly those of his later period, are notable for their complex texture, rich harmonies and orchestration, and the elaborate use of leitmotifs: musical themes associated with individual characters, places, ideas or plot elements. Unlike most other opera composers, Wagner wrote both the music and libretto for every one of his stage works. Perhaps the two best-known extracts from his works are the Ride of the Valkyries from the opera Die Walküre, and the Wedding March (Bridal Chorus) from the opera Lohengrin.
Initially establishing his reputation as a composer of works such as The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser which were broadly in the romantic vein of Weber and Meyerbeer, Wagner transformed operatic thought through his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk ("total work of art"). This would achieve the synthesis of all the poetic, visual, musical and dramatic arts and was announced in a series of essays between 1849 and 1852. Wagner realized this concept most fully in the first half of the monumental four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen. However, his thoughts on the relative importance of music and drama were to change again, and he reintroduced some traditional operatic forms into his last few stage works, including Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
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Robert Morse
Robert Morse (born May 18, 1931) is an American actor and singer. Morse is best known for his appearances in musicals and plays on Broadway. He has also acted in movies and television shows. His best known role is that of J. Pierrepont Finch in the 1961 Broadway musical, and 1967 film How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. He is currently known for his recurring role as Bertram Cooper on the show Mad Men.
Morse was born on May 18, 1931 in Newton, Massachusetts. After serving in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War, Morse appeared on Broadway as an actor.
He created the role of Barnaby in The Matchmaker on Broadway in 1955 opposite Ruth Gordon and reprised the role in the 1958 film adaptation, this time opposite Shirley Booth. That same year, he won the Theatre World Award and was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play for Say, Darling. Morse had to lobby David Merrick for a role in Take Me Along, as there was a question if he could, at 28, play a convincing 16 year old. He could and did. What was considered the final step toward full stardom was his performance as J. Pierrepont Finch in the Pulitzer Prize-winning How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying it won him the Tony for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical in 1962. He also starred in the 1967 movie version
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Robin Williams
Robin McLaurin Williams (born July 21, 1951) is an American actor and comedian. Rising to fame with his role as the alien Mork in the TV series Mork & Mindy, and later stand-up comedy work, Williams has performed in many feature films since 1980. He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the 1997 film Good Will Hunting. He has also won two Emmy Awards, four Golden Globes, two Screen Actors Guild Awards and five Grammy Awards.
Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Laura McLaurin (née Smith, 1922–2001), was a former model from New Orleans, Louisiana. His father, Robert Fitzgerald Williams (September 10, 1906 – October 18, 1987), was a senior executive at Ford Motor Company in charge of the Midwest region. His maternal great-great-grandfather was senator and Mississippi governor Anselm J. McLaurin. Williams is of English, Welsh, Irish, and French ancestry. He was raised in the Episcopal Church (his mother practiced Christian Science). He grew up in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, where he was a student at the Detroit Country Day School, and later moved to Woodacre, Marin County, California, where he attended the public Redwood High School. Williams studied at Claremont McKenna College (then called Claremont Men's College) for four years. He has two half-brothers: Todd (who died August 14, 2007) and McLaurin.
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Romeo Montague
Romeo is one of the title characters in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Romeo is the son of old Montague and his wife, who secretly loves and marries Juliet, a member of the rival House of Capulet. Forced into exile by his slaying of Tybalt, Juliet's cousin, in a duel, Romeo commits suicide upon hearing falsely of Juliet's death.
The character's origins can be traced as far back as Pyramus, who appears in Ovid's Metamorphoses, but the first modern incarnation of Romeo is Mariotto in the 33rd of Masuccio Salernitano's Il Novellino (1476). This story was adapted by Luigi da Porto as Giulietta e Romeo (1530), and Shakespeare's main source was an English verse translation of this text by Arthur Brooke. Although both Salernitano and da Porto claimed that their stories had historical basis, there is little evidence that this is the case.
Romeo is one of the most important characters of the play, and has a consistent presence throughout it. His role as an idealistic lover has led the word "Romeo" to become a synonym for a passionate male lover in various languages. Although often treated as such, it is not clear that "Montague" is a surname in the modern sense.
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Rutger Hauer
Rutger Oelsen Hauer (/ˈrʌtɡər ˈhaʊər/; Dutch pronunciation: [ˈrʏtxər ˈulsə(n) ˈɦʌuwər]; born 23 January 1944) is a Dutch stage, television and film actor. His career began in 1969 with the title role in the popular Dutch television series Floris, directed by Paul Verhoeven. His film credits include Flesh + Blood, Blind Fury, Blade Runner, The Hitcher, Nighthawks, Wedlock, Sin City, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Ladyhawke, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Osterman Weekend, The Blood of Heroes, Batman Begins, Hobo with a Shotgun, The Rite and he won a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor for Escape from Sobibor. Hauer is a dedicated environmentalist and has founded an AIDS awareness organization, the Rutger Hauer Starfish Association.
He is the father of actress Aysha Hauer and the grandfather of fashion model Leandro Maeder (b. Dec 14, 1987).
Hauer was born in Breukelen, in the Netherlands, the town lending its name to New York City's Borough Brooklyn. His parents were drama teachers Arend and Teunke. Rutger grew up in Amsterdam. Since his parents were very occupied with their careers, he and his three sisters (one older, two younger) were brought up mostly by nannies. At the age of 15, Hauer ran off to sea and spent a year scrubbing decks aboard a freighter. Returning home, he worked as an electrician and a joiner for three years while attending acting classes at night school. He went on to join an experimental troupe, with which he remained for five years before Paul Verhoeven cast him in the lead role of the very successful 1969 television series Floris, a Dutch Ivanhoe-like medieval action drama. The role made him famous in his native country.
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Sam Wanamaker
Samuel Wanamaker (14 June 1919 – 18 December 1993) was an American film director and actor and is credited as the person most responsible for the modern recreation of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. He was the father of actress Zoë Wanamaker.
Wanamaker was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants from Nikolayev, tailor Maurice Wattenmacker (Manus Watmakher) and Molly Bobele. He was the younger of two brothers, the elder being William Wanamaker, long time cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles. Wanamaker trained at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and began working with summer stock theatre companies in Chicago and northern Wisconsin, where he helped build the stage of the Peninsula Players Theatre in 1937.
Wanamaker began his acting career in traveling shows and later worked on Broadway. In 1940, he married Charlotte Holland, a Canadian radio soap star of the 1940s and later an actress.
In 1943, Wanamaker was part of the cast of the play Counterattack at the National Theatre, Washington D.C.. During the play he became enamored of the ideals of Communism and joined the American Communist Party. He attended Drake University prior to serving in the U.S. Army between 1943 and 1946 during the Second World War. In 1947 he returned to civilian life and, before relocating to Hollywood, quit the Communist Party.
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Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in France for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.
Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. Strongly influenced by James Joyce, he is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the "Theatre of the Absurd". His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". He was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984.
The Becketts were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland. The family home, Cooldrinagh in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Samuel's father, William. The house and garden, together with the surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse, the Foxrock railway station and Harcourt Street station at the city terminus of the line, all feature in his prose and plays. Beckett's father was a quantity surveyor and his mother a nurse.
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Sean Connery
Sir Thomas Sean Connery (born 25 August 1930) is a Scottish actor and producer who has won an Academy Award, two BAFTA Awards (one of them being a BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award) and three Golden Globes (including the Cecil B. DeMille Award and a Henrietta Award).
Connery is best known for portraying the character James Bond, starring in seven Bond films between 1962 and 1983 (six Eon Productions films and the non-canonical Thunderball remake, Never Say Never Again). In 1988, Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Untouchables. His film career also includes such films as Marnie, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Hunt for Red October, Highlander, Murder on the Orient Express, Dragonheart, and The Rock. He was knighted in July 2000. Connery has been polled as "The Greatest Living Scot" and "Scotland's Greatest Living National Treasure". In 1989, he was proclaimed "Sexiest Man Alive" by People magazine and in 1999, at age 69, he was voted "Sexiest Man of the Century".
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Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
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Shakespearean
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
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Shaun Micallef
Shaun Patrick Micallef (born 18 July 1962) is an Australian actor, comedian and writer. After ten years of working in insurance law as a solicitor in Adelaide, Micallef moved to Melbourne to pursue a full-time comedy career in 1993. He first gained recognition as a cast member of the sketch comedy show Full Frontal, which in turn led to a number of television roles including his own sketch show, The Micallef P(r)ogram(me), the sitcom Welcher & Welcher and the variety show Micallef Tonight. He also fronted the satirical news comedy series Newstopia on SBS and currently hosts the game show Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation on Network Ten.
In addition to his television work Micallef has appeared on stage, most notably in the Australian production of Boeing Boeing, and radio as the co-host of Melbourne station Vega 91.5 FM's morning program. He is also a published author; his book Smithereens was released in 2004, and re-released in January 2011. His other book, a novella by the name of Preincarnate, was released in 2010.
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Sheridan Morley
Sheridan Morley (5 December 1941, Ascot, Berkshire − 16 February 2007, London) was an English author, biographer, critic, director, actor and broadcaster. He was the eldest son of actor Robert Morley and grandson of actress Dame Gladys Cooper, and wrote biographies of both. Nicholas Kenyon called him a "cultural omnivore" who was "genuinely popular with people".
Sheridan Morley was born in Ascot, Berkshire, in a nursing home opposite Ascot Racecourse. He was named after Sheridan Whiteside, the title role his father was playing in a long-running production of The Man Who Came to Dinner at the Savoy Theatre in London.
He had close family connections with stars of the stage: in addition to his father and his maternal grandmother, his aunt married actor Robert Hardy, and Joanna Lumley was a cousin. His maternal grandfather, Herbert Buckmaster, founded the Buck's Club where his bartender McGarry invented the Buck's Fizz cocktail. His godparents were dramatist Sewell Stokes and actor Peter Bull; his son Hugo was one of Noël Coward's many godchildren.
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Sherlock Holmes
Sherlock Holmes ( /ˈʃɜrlɒk ˈhoʊmz/) is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to adopt almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve difficult cases.
Holmes, who first appeared in publication in 1887, was featured in four novels and 56 short stories. The first novel, A Study in Scarlet, appeared in Beeton's Christmas Annual in 1887 and the second, The Sign of the Four, in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in 1890. The character grew tremendously in popularity with the first series of short stories in Strand Magazine, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891; further series of short stories and two novels published in serial form appeared between then and 1927. The stories cover a period from around 1880 up to 1914.
All but four stories are narrated by Holmes's friend and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson; two are narrated by Holmes himself ("The Blanched Soldier" and "The Lion's Mane") and two others are written in the third person ("The Mazarin Stone" and "His Last Bow"). In two stories ("The Musgrave Ritual" and "The Gloria Scott"), Holmes tells Watson the main story from his memories, while Watson becomes the narrator of the frame story. The first and fourth novels, A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear, each include a long interval of omniscient narration recounting events unknown to either Holmes or Watson.
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Sidney Poitier
Sir Sidney Poitier, KBE ( /ˈpwɑːtjeɪ/ or /ˈpwɑːti.eɪ/; born February 20, 1927) is a Bahamian American actor, film director, author, and diplomat.
In 1963, Poitier became the first black person to win an Academy Award for Best Actor for his role in Lilies of the Field. The significance of this achievement was later bolstered in 1967 when he starred in three well-received films To Sir, with Love; In the Heat of the Night; and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, making him the top box office star of that year. In all three films, issues revolve around the race of the characters Poitier portrays. In 1999, the American Film Institute named Poitier among the Greatest Male Stars of All Time, ranking 22nd on the list of 25.
Poitier has directed a number of popular movies such as A Piece of the Action; Uptown Saturday Night, and Let's Do It Again (with friend Bill Cosby), and Stir Crazy (starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder). In 2002, 38 years after receiving the Best Actor Award, Poitier was chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to receive an Honorary Award, designated "To Sidney Poitier in recognition of his remarkable accomplishments as an artist and as a human being." Since 1997 he has been the Bahamian ambassador to Japan. On August 12, 2009, Sidney Poitier was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States of America's highest civilian honor, by President Barack Obama.
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Simon Russell Beale
Simon Russell Beale, CBE (born 12 January 1961) is an English actor and music historian. He has been described by The Independent as "the greatest stage actor of his generation."
Beale was born to Lieutenant-General Sir Peter Beale, and Julia Winter in Penang, Malaya, where his father served as a physician, later going on to become Surgeon General of the British Armed Forces. Several members of his family had careers in medicine. He was first drawn to performance when, at the age of eight, he became a chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral, and a pupil at the adjoining St Paul's Cathedral School.
Aged 14 he gave his first theatre performance playing Desdemona in Othello at the independent school Clifton College's Redgrave Theatre; in the sixth form he also performed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a play in which he would later star at the National Theatre. After Clifton, he went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and obtained a first in English, after which he was offered a place to do a PhD. He graduated from Guildhall School of Music and Drama in 1983.
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Stanley Tucci
Stanley Tucci (born November 11, 1960) is an American actor, writer, film producer and film director. He has been nominated for several notable film awards, including an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, for his critically acclaimed performance in The Lovely Bones (2009). He also has won an Emmy for his performance in Winchell, and has been nominated for a Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for Children – "The One And Only Shrek".
Tucci, an Italian American, was born in Peekskill, New York, the son of Joan (née Tropiano), a secretary and writer, and Stanley Tucci, Sr., an art teacher at Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, New York. His sister is actress Christine Tucci, and his cousin is the screenwriter and retired history teacher Joseph Tropiano. He grew up in Katonah, New York, and attended John Jay High School. Tucci played on the John Jay soccer team and baseball teams; his main interest lay in the school's drama club, where he and fellow actor and high school buddy, Campbell Scott, son of actor George C. Scott, gave well-received performances at many of John Jay's drama club productions. Tucci attended SUNY Purchase, and completed his B.F.A. degree after four years in the school's Conservatory of Theatre Arts.
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Stephen King
Stephen Edwin King (born September 21, 1947) is an American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy fiction. His books have sold more than 350 million copies and have been adapted into a number of feature films, television movies and comic books. As of 2011, King has written and published 49 novels, including seven under the pen name Richard Bachman, five non-fiction books, and nine collections of short stories. Many of his stories are set in his home state of Maine.
King has received Bram Stoker Awards, World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Society Awards, his novella The Way Station was a Nebula Award novelette nominee, and in 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has also received awards for his contribution to literature for his whole career, such as the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement (2004), the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award (2007) and the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America (2007).
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Sybil Thorndike
Dame Agnes Sybil Thorndike CH DBE (24 October 1882 – 9 June 1976) was a British actress.
She was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire to Arthur Thorndike and Agnes Macdonald. Her father was a Canon of Rochester Cathedral. She was educated at Rochester Grammar School for Girls, and first trained as a classical pianist, making weekly visits to London for music lessons at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
She gave her first public performance as a pianist at the age of 11, but in 1899 was forced to give up playing owing to piano cramp. At the instigation of her brother, the author Russell Thorndike, she then trained as an actress.
At the age of 21 she was offered her first professional contract: a tour of the United States with the actor-manager Ben Greet's company. She made her first stage appearance in Greet's 1904 production of Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor. She went on to tour the U.S. in Shakespearean repertory for four years, playing some 112 roles.
In 1908 Sybil was spotted by the playwright George Bernard Shaw when she understudied the leading role of Candida in a tour directed by Shaw himself. There she also met her future husband, Lewis Casson. They were married in December 1908, and had four children - John (1909–1999), Christopher (1912–1996), Mary (1914–2009) and Ann (1915–1990).
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Sydney Cockerell
Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell (16 July 1867 – 1 May 1962) was an English museum curator and collector.
Sydney Cockerell made his way initially as clerk in the family coal business, George J. Cockerell & Co, until he met John Ruskin. According to John Ruskin by Tim Hilton (p. 816), around 1887 Cockerell sent Ruskin some sea shells, which he collected. At that time he had already met William Morris. Cockerell tried to patch up a quarrel between Ruskin and Octavia Hill (Hilton, p. 832), who had been a friend of his late father Sydney John Cockerell, and godmother to his sister Olive.
From 1891, Cockerell gained a more solid entry to intellectual circles, working for the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. The architect Detmar Blow was a friend (Hilton p.843). He acted as private secretary to William Morris, becoming a major collector of Kelmscott Press books; was secretary also to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; and was Thomas Hardy's executor. From 1908 to 1937 he was Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge.
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Tim Conway
Thomas Daniel "Tim" Conway (born December 15, 1933) is an Emmy award-winning American comedian and actor, who has worked in sitcoms, sketch comedy, and film. Conway is best known for his role in the popular 1960s WWII sitcom McHale's Navy as the inept Ensign Charles Parker, second in command to Lt. Commander Quinton McHale (Ernest Borgnine), and for co-starring alongside Carol Burnett on The Carol Burnett Show.
Conway was born in Willoughby, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, to an Irish father and Romanian mother, and grew up in nearby Chagrin Falls. He attended Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, majoring in speech and radio, and was a member of the Phi Delta Theta Fraternity. After graduating, he joined the Army, and thereafter took a job at a Cleveland radio station, at first answering mail and later as a writer in the promotional department. Conway changed his first name to "Tim" to avoid confusion with actor Tom Conway.
Conway moved back to Cleveland to work with Ernie Anderson on KYW-TV, an NBC affiliate, in 1958 and 1959 and later, from 1960 to 1962, on WJW TV, (then the CBS affiliate) on the weekday morning film (under the Ernie's Place banner) where he also wrote material for the comedic skits shown in between film intermissions. Conway recorded a comedy album with Anderson.
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Tom Berenger
Tom Berenger (born May 31, 1949) is an American actor known mainly for his roles in action films.
Berenger's father was a printer for the Chicago Sun-Times. Berenger has a sister, Susan. He picked "Berenger" as his professional name, after a school friend, because there was already a "Tom Moore" in the Actors' Equity Association. He graduated from Rich East High School in Park Forest, Illinois, in 1967. Berenger studied journalism at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, but decided to seek an acting career following his graduation. The Tom Berenger Acting Scholarship Fund was established in 1988 by Tom Berenger to award Theatre students for excellence in performance. He worked first in regional theatre and moved to New York City in the 1970s.Is of Irish heritage.
Berenger worked in soap operas and had a starring role on One Life to Live. His feature film debut was the lead in Rush It (1976), an independent film now mostly forgotten except for those of its cast members who went on to greater renown. In 1977, Berenger had a small but noticeable role as a murderer in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. In 1978, he had a starring role in In Praise of Older Women for Avco-Embassy Pictures. In 1979, he played Butch Cassidy in Butch and Sundance: The Early Days, a role he got in part because of his resemblance to Paul Newman, who played the character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). These early roles highlighted Berenger's ability to play both villains and heroes.
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Tom Cruise
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV ( /ˈtɒməs ˈkruːz ˈmeɪpɒθər/; born July 3, 1962), widely known as Tom Cruise, is an American film actor and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and has won three Golden Globe Awards for the same movies: Born on the Fourth of July (1989), Jerry Maguire (1996), Magnolia (1999). He started his career with the movie Endless Love. Cruise's first appearance in a major film was in 1981's Taps. His first leading role was in the film Risky Business, released in August 1983. Cruise played the role of a heroic naval pilot in the popular and successful 1986 film Top Gun, and also secret agent Ethan Hunt in the series of Mission: Impossible action films.
He has starred in a variety of other successful films, including: Rain Man (1988), Days of Thunder (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), Vanilla Sky (2001), Minority Report (2002), The Last Samurai (2003), Collateral (2004), and War of the Worlds (2005).
Since 2005, Cruise and Paula Wagner have been in charge of the United Artists film studio, with Cruise as producer and star and Wagner as the chief executive. Cruise is also known for his support of and adherence to the Church of Scientology.
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Tommy Lee Jones
Tommy Lee Jones (born September 15, 1946) is an American actor and film director. He has received three Academy Award nominations, winning one as Best Supporting Actor for the 1993 thriller film The Fugitive.
His notable film roles include federal marshal Samuel Gerard in The Fugitive and U.S. Marshals, Agent K in Men in Black and its sequels, Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men, the villain "Two-Face" in Batman Forever, terrorist William Strannix in Under Siege, former Texas Ranger Woodrow F. Call in Lonesome Dove, a Texas Ranger in Man of the House and rancher Pete Perkins in The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, and Colonel Chester Phillips in Captain America: The First Avenger. Jones has also portrayed real-life figures such as businessman Howard Hughes, executed murderer Gary Gilmore, Oliver Lynn in Coal Miner's Daughter and baseball great Ty Cobb.
Jones was born in San Saba, Texas. His mother, Lucille Marie (née Scott), was a police officer, school teacher, and beauty shop owner, and his father, Clyde C. Jones, was an oil field worker. The two were married and divorced twice. Jones has stated that his grandmother was of Cherokee ancestry. He was a resident of Midland, Texas, and attended Robert E. Lee High School.
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Tyrone Guthrie
Sir William Tyrone Guthrie (2 July 1900 – 15 May 1971) was an English theatrical director instrumental in the founding of the Stratford Festival of Canada, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, at his family's ancestral home, Annaghmakerrig, near Newbliss in County Monaghan, Ireland.
Guthrie was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, the son of Dr Thomas Guthrie (a grandson of the Scottish preacher Thomas Guthrie) and Norah Power. His mother Norah was the daughter of Sir William James Tyrone Power, Commissary-General-in-chief of the British Army from 1863 to 1869 and Martha, daughter of Dr. John Moorhead of Annaghmakerrig House and his Philadelphia-born wife, Susan (née Allibone) Humphreys. His great-grandfather was the Irish actor Tyrone Power. He was also a second cousin of the Hollywood actor Tyrone Power. His sister, Susan Margaret, married his close university friend, fellow Anglo-Irishman Hubert Butler. Butler translated the text for Guthrie's 1934 production of Anton Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, for perhaps its first English-language production.
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Val Gielgud
Val Henry Gielgud (28 April 1900 – 30 November 1981) was an English actor, writer, director and broadcaster. He was a pioneer of radio drama for the BBC, and also directed the first ever drama to be produced in the newer medium of television.
Val Gielgud was born in London, into a theatrical family, being the brother of Sir John Gielgud (who appeared in several of his productions) and a great-nephew of the Victorian actress Ellen Terry.
Following education at Oxford University, Gielgud began his career as a secretary to a Member of Parliament, before moving into writing when he took a job as the sub-editor of a comic book / magazine. It was this job that led him to work for the BBC's own listings the magazine, the Radio Times, as the assistant to the editor Eric Maschwitz. This was Gielgud's first connection to the Corporation, and although he was not involved in any radio production, he often used his position at the magazine to make his thoughts on radio dramas felt: in his autobiography, he later confessed to having written several of the letters appearing on the magazine's correspondence page, supposedly from listeners, criticising various aspects of the Corporation's programming.
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Vic Tayback
Victor "Vic" Tayback (January 6, 1930 – May 25, 1990) was an American actor.
Tayback was born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, the son of Helen (née Hanood) and Najeeb James Tayback. His parents were immigrants from Aleppo, Syria. Tayback moved with his family to Burbank, California, during his teenage years and attended Burbank High School. He ended up living in the city for the rest of his life.
His most famous role was diner owner Mel Sharples in the 1974 movie Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, followed by his reprisal of the role on the related television series, Alice, which ran from 1976 to 1985. He was the only cast member of the original film to reprise his role in the television version. (Film co-star Diane Ladd later joined the TV version of Alice, playing a different character, and Alfred Lutter who reprised his role as Tommy for the pilot episode.).
Tayback also guest starred in an episode of the fourth season of All in the Family which was called "Et tu, Archie?" In this particular episode, Tayback portrayed Archie's old friend, Joe Tucker.
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Victor Saville
Victor Saville (25 September 1895, Birmingham, England – 8 May 1979, London) was an English film director, producer and screenwriter. He directed 39 films between 1927 and 1954. He also produced 36 films between 1923 and 1962.
He produced his first film, Woman to Woman, with Michael Balcon in 1923, and on the back of its success produced pictures for the veteran director Maurice Elvey, including the classic British silent Hindle Wakes (1927). His first picture as director was The Arcadians in 1927. In 1929 he and Michael Balcon worked together again on a talkie remake of Woman to Woman for Balcon's company, Gainsborough Pictures, this time directed by Saville himself.
From 1931, as Gainsborough Pictures and the Gaumont British Picture Corporation joined forces, Victor Saville produced a string of comedies, musicals and dramas for Gainsborough and Gaumont-British, including the popular Jessie Matthews pictures. In 1937 he left to set up his own production company, Victor Saville Productions, and made three pictures for Alexander Korda's London Films at Denham studios.
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Vincent J. Donehue
Vincent Julian Donehue (September 22, 1915 - January 17, 1966) was an American director noted mainly for his theatre work, with occasional film and television credits.
Donehue was born in Whitehall, New York. He was a graduate of the Christian Brothers Academy and the former State Teachers' College, both in Albany, New York. He served in the Army Air Force for 5 years.
His Broadway credits as director include The Trip to Bountiful (1953) starring Lillian Gish, Jo Van Fleet and Eva Marie Saint, The Traveling Lady (1954) with Kim Stanley, Tennessee Williams' 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1955) with Maureen Stapleton, Sunrise at Campobello (1958) which won him the Tony Award for Best Direction, the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II musical The Sound of Music (1959) starring Mary Martin, which earned him another Tony nomination, Daughter of Silence (1961), Lord Pengo (1962) with Charles Boyer and Agnes Moorehead, Jennie (1963) with Mary Martin and Catch Me if You Can. He also restaged the 1954 Mary Martin Peter Pan for television in 1960, the third telecast of the Broadway stage musical.
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Vivien Leigh
Vivien Leigh, Lady Olivier (5 November 1913 – 8 July 1967) was an English actress. She won the Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she also played on stage in London's West End, as well as for her portrayal of the southern belle Scarlett O'Hara, alongside Clark Gable, in the epic American Civil War drama Gone with the Wind.
She was a prolific stage performer, frequently in collaboration with her then-husband, Laurence Olivier, who directed her in several of her roles. During her 30-year stage career, she played roles ranging from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth.
Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress. However, ill health proved to be her greatest obstacle. For much of her adult life Leigh suffered from bipolar disorder. She earned a reputation for being difficult to work with, and her career suffered periods of inactivity. She also suffered recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, first diagnosed in the mid-1940s. Leigh and Olivier divorced in 1960, and she worked sporadically in film and theatre until her death from tuberculosis in 1967.
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Wendy Hiller
Dame Wendy Margaret Hiller DBE (15 August 1912 – 14 May 2003) was an Academy Award-winning English film and stage actress, who enjoyed a varied acting career that spanned nearly sixty years. The writer Joel Hirschorn, in his 1984 compilation Rating the Movie Stars, described her as "a no-nonsense actress who literally took command of the screen whenever she appeared on film". Despite many notable film performances, she chose to remain primarily a stage actress.
Born in Bramhall, Stockport, in Cheshire, the daughter of Frank Watkin Hiller, a Manchester cotton manufacturer, and Marie Stone, Hiller began her professional career as an actress in repertory at Manchester in the early 1930s. She first found success as slum dweller Sally Hardcastle in the stage version of Love on the Dole in 1934. The play was an enormous success and toured the regional stages of England. This play saw her West End debut in 1935 at the Garrick Theatre. She married the play's author Ronald Gow, fifteen years her senior, in 1937 (the same year as she made her film debut in Lancashire Luck, scripted by Gow).
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William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
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Gielgud, John Filmography
- Alice in Wonderland Stills Gallery (2010)
- Alice in Wonderland Stills Gallery (2010)
- There's Something About... Morse (2007)
- Brando (2007)
- Never Apologize (2007)
- Check the Gate: Putting Beckett on Film (2003)
- The 73rd Annual Academy Awards (2001)
- Catastrophe (2000)
- Quest for Camelot (1998)
- Elizabeth (1998)
- The Tichborne Claimant (1998)
- Arena: The Sir Noel Coward Trilogy (1998)
- The Harvest of Sorrow (1998)
- Dennis Pennis R.I.P. (1997)
- To Be on Camera: A History with Hamlet (1997)
- The Making of 'Dragonheart' (1997)
- David (1997)
- Gulliver's Travels (1996)
- Shine (1996)
- Looking for Richard (1996)
- The Leopard Son (1996)
- DragonHeart (1996)
- The Portrait of a Lady (1996)
- Hamlet (1996)
- First Knight (1995)
- Westminster Abbey (1995)
- Haunted (1995)
- A Summer Day's Dream (1994)
- Scarlett (1994)
- Shining Through (1992)
- The Power of One (1992)
- Swan Song (1992)
- Prospero's Books (1991)
- The Best of Friends (1991)
- A Walk Through Prospero's Library (1991)
- Vivien Leigh: Scarlett and Beyond (1990)
- Strike It Rich (1990)
- Getting It Right (1989)
- War and Remembrance: A Living History (1988)
- A Man for All Seasons (1988)
- Appointment with Death (1988)
- Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988)
- Funny, You Don't Look 200: A Constitutional Vaudeville (1987)
- The Whistle Blower (1987)
- An Evening with Kiri Te Kanawa (1987)
- Barbablù, Barbablù (1987)
- The Canterville Ghost (1986)
- The Shooting Party (1985)
- Plenty (1985)
- Leave All Fair (1985)
- Romance on the Orient Express (1985)
- Ingrid (1984)
- The Master of Ballantrae (1984)
- Scandalous (1984)
- Frankenstein (1984)
- Camille (1984)
- Ingrid (1984)
- The Wicked Lady (1983)
- The Scarlet and the Black (1983)
- Invitation to the Wedding (1983)
- A Christmas Carol (1982)
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1982)
- Gandhi (1982)
- Inside the Third Reich (1982)
- Lion of the Desert (1981)
- Voyage to the End of the Earth (1981)
- Sphinx (1981)
- Seven Dials Mystery (1981)
- Priest of Love (1981)
- Chariots of Fire (1981)
- Arthur (1981)
- Dyrygent (1980)
- Why Didn't They Ask Evans? (1980)
- The Formula (1980)
- Every Night Something Atrocious (1980)
- The Elephant Man (1980)
- Murder by Decree (1979)
- Caligola (1979)
- The Human Factor (1979)
- King Richard the Second (1978)
- Romeo & Juliet (1978)
- No Man's Land (1978)
- Les Miserables (1978)
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977)
- Joseph Andrews (1977)
- Night of 100 Stars (1977)
- Providence (1977)
- Fall In, the Stars (1977)
- Peter Pan (1976)
- Aces High (1976)
- Galileo (1975)
- Gold (1974)
- Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
- 11 Harrowhouse (1974)
- Frankenstein: The True Story (1973)
- Lost Horizon (1973)
- Probe (1972)
- Eagle in a Cage (1972)
- Hassan (1971)
- Hamlet Revisited: Approaches to Hamlet (1970)
- Julius Caesar (1970)
- Carol Channing's Mad English Tea Party (1970)
- Hamlet Revisited: Approaches to Hamlet (1970)
- Oh! What a Lovely War (1969)
- The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968)
- The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968)
- Assignment to Kill (1968)
- The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968)
- From Chekhov with Love (1968)
- Sebastian (1968)
- Révolution d'octobre (1967)
- Ages of Man (1966)
- Alice in Wonderland (1966)
- Treasure Island (1965)
- The Loved One (1965)
- Campanadas a medianoche (1965)
- Hamlet (1964)
- Hamlet (1964)
- Becket (1964)
- Hamlet (1964)
- Farewell to the Vic (1963)
- Mourir à Madrid (1963)
- The Cherry Orchard (1962)
- The Immortal Land (1958)
- Saint Joan (1957)
- The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957)
- Salute to Show Business (1957)
- Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)
- Sunshine in Soho (1956)
- Richard III (1955)
- Romeo and Juliet (1954)
- Julius Caesar (1953)
- A Diary for Timothy (1945)
- A Diary for Timothy (1945)
- Niedokonczona podróz (1943)
- An Airman's Letter to His Mother (1941)
- The Prime Minister (1941)
- Spring Meeting (1938)
- Full Fathom Five (1937)
- Secret Agent (1936)
- Secret Agent (1936)
- The Good Companions (1933)
- Insult (1932)
- The Clue of the New Pin (1929)
- Who Is the Man? (1924)
Famous quotes by John Gielgud:
"I have been extraordinarily lucky,"
"Before you can do something you must first be something."
"Your English style will no doubt put all the other gentlemen to bed. I speak figuratively, of course."
"One mustn't allow acting to be like stockbroker -- you must not take it just as a means of earning a living, to go down every day to do a job of work. The big thing is to combine punctuality, efficiency, good nature, obedience, intelligence, and concentration with an unawareness of what is going to happen next, thus keeping yourself available for excitement."
"Olivier's was, to my mind, the definitive Macbeth. Olivier had murder in his heart the moment he came on the stage."
"Acting is half shame, half glory. Shame at exhibiting yourself, glory when you can forget yourself."
"I have been extraordinarily lucky,"
"Before you can do something you must first be something."
"Your English style will no doubt put all the other gentlemen to bed. I speak figuratively, of course."
"One mustn't allow acting to be like stockbroker -- you must not take it just as a means of earning a living, to go down every day to do a job of work. The big thing is to combine punctuality, efficiency, good nature, obedience, intelligence, and concentration with an unawareness of what is going to happen next, thus keeping yourself available for excitement."
"Olivier's was, to my mind, the definitive Macbeth. Olivier had murder in his heart the moment he came on the stage."
"Acting is half shame, half glory. Shame at exhibiting yourself, glory when you can forget yourself."
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Sir John Gielgud Newsnight Interview 2005 Part 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 14:30
- Updated: 05 Dec 2012
Uploaded with Free Video Converter from Freemake www.freemake.com
http://wn.com/Sir_John_Gielgud_Newsnight_Interview_2005_Part_1
Uploaded with Free Video Converter from Freemake www.freemake.com
John Gielgud | Ulysses (1996)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:00
- Updated: 17 Dec 2012
Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. - Alfred Tennyson, 1833. Music: Gustav Holst - The Planets Op.32 Jupiter
http://wn.com/John_Gielgud_|_Ulysses_1996
Come, my friends, 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths Of all the western stars, until I die. It may be that the gulfs will wash us down; It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles, And see the great Achilles, whom we knew. Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho' We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. - Alfred Tennyson, 1833. Music: Gustav Holst - The Planets Op.32 Jupiter
- published: 25 Apr 2008
- views: 94499
- author: KidMillions
The Grand Inquisitor - John Gielgud
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 25:53
- Updated: 16 Dec 2012
A rare version 1975 of The Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov produced by the Open University. Inquisitor: John Gielgud, Prisoner: Michael Feast, Other characters: Victor Hooper & Mark Ezra, John Dolan, Translation: Jeremy Brooks & Kitty Hunter Blair, Costumes: Brian Cox, Make-up: Maggie Webb, Produced by Richard Argent
http://wn.com/The_Grand_Inquisitor_John_Gielgud
A rare version 1975 of The Grand Inquisitor from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov produced by the Open University. Inquisitor: John Gielgud, Prisoner: Michael Feast, Other characters: Victor Hooper & Mark Ezra, John Dolan, Translation: Jeremy Brooks & Kitty Hunter Blair, Costumes: Brian Cox, Make-up: Maggie Webb, Produced by Richard Argent
- published: 13 Jan 2012
- views: 9461
- author: grandtheftimpro
Hamlet "To be or not to be" - Richard Burton (1964)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:14
- Updated: 16 Dec 2012
Richard Burton's "Hamlet", directed by John Gielgud, produced by Alexander H. Cohen. Filmed live on Broadway in 1964 and released to theaters in Electronovision. It was the longest running "Hamlet" in Broadway history. Act 3, Scene 1. Richard Burton and Linda Marsh
http://wn.com/Hamlet_To_be_or_not_to_be_Richard_Burton_1964
Richard Burton's "Hamlet", directed by John Gielgud, produced by Alexander H. Cohen. Filmed live on Broadway in 1964 and released to theaters in Electronovision. It was the longest running "Hamlet" in Broadway history. Act 3, Scene 1. Richard Burton and Linda Marsh
- published: 28 Jul 2009
- views: 280368
- author: tvclassics
Sir John Gielgud in "Arthur" (1981)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:31
- Updated: 09 Dec 2012
(via Wikipedia) "Sir Arthur John Gielgud, (14 April 1904 -- 21 May 2000) was an English actor, director, and producer. He achieved early international acclaim for his youthful, emotionally expressive Hamlet which broke box office records on Broadway in 1937. He was known for his beautiful speaking of verse and particularly for his warm and expressive voice, which his colleague Sir Alec Guinness likened to "a silver trumpet muffled in silk". Gielgud is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award." Here, in a more commercial work which gave him his 1st Academy Award. 1981: Winner for Best Supporting Actor, for Arthur. He' s outstanding.
http://wn.com/Sir_John_Gielgud_in_Arthur_1981
(via Wikipedia) "Sir Arthur John Gielgud, (14 April 1904 -- 21 May 2000) was an English actor, director, and producer. He achieved early international acclaim for his youthful, emotionally expressive Hamlet which broke box office records on Broadway in 1937. He was known for his beautiful speaking of verse and particularly for his warm and expressive voice, which his colleague Sir Alec Guinness likened to "a silver trumpet muffled in silk". Gielgud is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award." Here, in a more commercial work which gave him his 1st Academy Award. 1981: Winner for Best Supporting Actor, for Arthur. He' s outstanding.
- published: 27 Apr 2011
- views: 21292
- author: MrFotakias
Coronation Record 1937 - John Gielgud recites Shakespeare
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:13
- Updated: 11 Nov 2012
A Souvenir Disc marking the Coronation of King George VI in 1937 features John Gielgud reciting Shakespeare and Elgar's arrangement of the National Anthem. (78rpm shellac recording).
http://wn.com/Coronation_Record_1937_John_Gielgud_recites_Shakespeare
A Souvenir Disc marking the Coronation of King George VI in 1937 features John Gielgud reciting Shakespeare and Elgar's arrangement of the National Anthem. (78rpm shellac recording).
- published: 25 Apr 2011
- views: 1084
- author: adam28xx
Tempest Epilogue
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:20
- Updated: 14 Dec 2012
Prospero's monologue from Shakespire's The Tempest
http://wn.com/Tempest_Epilogue
Prospero's monologue from Shakespire's The Tempest
- published: 22 Dec 2007
- views: 57235
- author: nekto111
Hamlet and The Ghost - Richard Burton, John Gielgud (1964)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:07
- Updated: 10 Dec 2012
Richard Burton's "Hamlet", directed by John Gielgud, produced by Alexander H. Cohen. Filmed live on Broadway in 1964 and released to theaters in Electronovision. It was the longest running "Hamlet" in Broadway history. Act 1, Scene 4,5. Richard Burton, John Gielgud, Barnard Hughes
http://wn.com/Hamlet_and_The_Ghost_Richard_Burton,_John_Gielgud_1964
Richard Burton's "Hamlet", directed by John Gielgud, produced by Alexander H. Cohen. Filmed live on Broadway in 1964 and released to theaters in Electronovision. It was the longest running "Hamlet" in Broadway history. Act 1, Scene 4,5. Richard Burton, John Gielgud, Barnard Hughes
- published: 29 Jul 2009
- views: 22059
- author: tvclassics
John Gielgud & Edith Evans: The Importance of Being Earnest
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:34
- Updated: 30 Oct 2012
John Gielgud & Edith Evans as John Worthing and Lady Augusta Bracknell in the famous 'handbag' interrogation scene in the play by Oscar Wilde I feel Edith Evans' portrayal far superior to that of Judi Dench's, although I haven't heard or seen Maggie Smith's performance in the role which I am sure equalled or surpassed even that of Dame Edith.
http://wn.com/John_Gielgud_Edith_Evans_The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest
John Gielgud & Edith Evans as John Worthing and Lady Augusta Bracknell in the famous 'handbag' interrogation scene in the play by Oscar Wilde I feel Edith Evans' portrayal far superior to that of Judi Dench's, although I haven't heard or seen Maggie Smith's performance in the role which I am sure equalled or surpassed even that of Dame Edith.
- published: 11 Apr 2008
- views: 51906
- author: JimmyThatcher
John Gielgud in Prospero's Books: A Poem by Charles Bryant
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:22
- Updated: 14 Dec 2012
My beloved father's personal good looks and profile bore some resemblance to those of John Gielgud. He had a similarly deeply resonant speaking voice; and his habit of half-humorously addressing me as his 'dear boy' had a touch of the stage about it. So that whenever I watch and listen to Gielgud it seems as if I am in presence of the paternal principle. John was 87 when he made the film of Prospero's Books with Peter Greenaway. (I hope I'm as hale if ever I reach that age!) The film had what are called 'mixed reviews' but for me it's a wonderful piece of cinema. Unfortunately it's not available on DVD although you can apparently obtain copies of it on VHS - if you have a machine capable of playing these casettes. You can get a taster from my video and further excerpts are on You Tube. The music is by Michael Nyman - it's ideal for reading to (with or against) since it has almost no development; it just goes on - and for that reason it echoes and echoes in the mind, in my mind, along with the similarly unforgettable voices of Johnnie and my own dear father and the eternal cadences of the immortal William. (OTT? - oh well......) John Gielgud in Prospero's Books A Poem by Charles Bryant Music and text both admirable, concept intriguing, performance beyond reproach; for shapeliness unbeaten. Age is here the apogee. His voice, coached through the decades, now so clear it equally can soar or fall with minimal conscious effort, an instrument tuned to perfection, crammed with ...
http://wn.com/John_Gielgud_in_Prospero's_Books_A_Poem_by_Charles_Bryant
My beloved father's personal good looks and profile bore some resemblance to those of John Gielgud. He had a similarly deeply resonant speaking voice; and his habit of half-humorously addressing me as his 'dear boy' had a touch of the stage about it. So that whenever I watch and listen to Gielgud it seems as if I am in presence of the paternal principle. John was 87 when he made the film of Prospero's Books with Peter Greenaway. (I hope I'm as hale if ever I reach that age!) The film had what are called 'mixed reviews' but for me it's a wonderful piece of cinema. Unfortunately it's not available on DVD although you can apparently obtain copies of it on VHS - if you have a machine capable of playing these casettes. You can get a taster from my video and further excerpts are on You Tube. The music is by Michael Nyman - it's ideal for reading to (with or against) since it has almost no development; it just goes on - and for that reason it echoes and echoes in the mind, in my mind, along with the similarly unforgettable voices of Johnnie and my own dear father and the eternal cadences of the immortal William. (OTT? - oh well......) John Gielgud in Prospero's Books A Poem by Charles Bryant Music and text both admirable, concept intriguing, performance beyond reproach; for shapeliness unbeaten. Age is here the apogee. His voice, coached through the decades, now so clear it equally can soar or fall with minimal conscious effort, an instrument tuned to perfection, crammed with ...
- published: 27 Mar 2010
- views: 16151
- author: brychar66
"The Loved One" Mr. Joyboy
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:56
- Updated: 22 Sep 2012
Rod Steiger in the 1965 Tony Richardson film "The Loved One"
http://wn.com/The_Loved_One_Mr_Joyboy
Rod Steiger in the 1965 Tony Richardson film "The Loved One"
- published: 10 Jun 2010
- views: 5926
- author: ednixon
Caligula-Nerva Commits Suicide
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:09
- Updated: 12 Sep 2012
Nerva....John Gielgud...commits suicide while Tiberius...Peter O Toole...and Caligula....Malcolm McDowell...watch. This is the infamous "Caligula" starring Malcolm McDowell, Peter O Toole, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud. This is from a Beta tape of mine from about 1989. This is from the Vestron 160 minute cut of the film. Many version have been released over the years....usually with the sex and violence removed. This has both. While rewatching the film after all these years...thanks to Youtube I dug out my Beta player which has been in storage since 1991...I dont find it as shocking as it was then. The violence and cruelty which was way over the top for its day is standard fare now for all slasher films. If you take out the couple of graphic sex scenes what you have is another R rated feature. But what is wonderful to see is the acting of Malcom McDowell. His "Caligula" is brillant...equal to John Hurts performance of the Roman tyrant in "I Claudius". And I cant forget Peter O Toole, in his prime as the decadent "Tiberius" and Gore Vidals screenplay.
http://wn.com/Caligula-Nerva_Commits_Suicide
Nerva....John Gielgud...commits suicide while Tiberius...Peter O Toole...and Caligula....Malcolm McDowell...watch. This is the infamous "Caligula" starring Malcolm McDowell, Peter O Toole, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud. This is from a Beta tape of mine from about 1989. This is from the Vestron 160 minute cut of the film. Many version have been released over the years....usually with the sex and violence removed. This has both. While rewatching the film after all these years...thanks to Youtube I dug out my Beta player which has been in storage since 1991...I dont find it as shocking as it was then. The violence and cruelty which was way over the top for its day is standard fare now for all slasher films. If you take out the couple of graphic sex scenes what you have is another R rated feature. But what is wonderful to see is the acting of Malcom McDowell. His "Caligula" is brillant...equal to John Hurts performance of the Roman tyrant in "I Claudius". And I cant forget Peter O Toole, in his prime as the decadent "Tiberius" and Gore Vidals screenplay.
- published: 20 May 2007
- views: 66325
- author: mprwac
Edmund Waller - Go, Lovely Rose - John Gielgud
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:06
- Updated: 23 Jun 2012
Sir John Gielgud reads Edmund Waller's Go, Lovely Rose Go, Lovely Rose by Edmund Waller (1606-1687) Go, lovely rose! Tell her that wastes her time and me, That now she knows, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be. Tell her that's young, And shuns to have her graces spied, That hadst thou sprung In deserts, where no men abide, Thou must have uncommended died. Small is the worth Of beauty from the light retired; Bid her come forth, Suffer herself to be desired, And not blush so to be admired. Then die! that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee; How small a part of time they share That are so wondrous sweet and fair!
http://wn.com/Edmund_Waller_Go,_Lovely_Rose_John_Gielgud
Sir John Gielgud reads Edmund Waller's Go, Lovely Rose Go, Lovely Rose by Edmund Waller (1606-1687) Go, lovely rose! Tell her that wastes her time and me, That now she knows, When I resemble her to thee, How sweet and fair she seems to be. Tell her that's young, And shuns to have her graces spied, That hadst thou sprung In deserts, where no men abide, Thou must have uncommended died. Small is the worth Of beauty from the light retired; Bid her come forth, Suffer herself to be desired, And not blush so to be admired. Then die! that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee; How small a part of time they share That are so wondrous sweet and fair!
- published: 15 Jan 2012
- views: 524
- author: poetictouch2012
Othello's Speech, Act 1 Scene 3 - John Gielgud
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:43
- Updated: 26 Jun 2012
Spoken by John Gielgud
http://wn.com/Othello's_Speech,_Act_1_Scene_3_John_Gielgud
Sir John Gielgud - A Knight in the Theatre
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:09
- Updated: 16 Nov 2012
Stage Play - Sir John Gielgud reminisces about his life in this excerpt from the play "Gielgud - A Knight in the Theatre", written and performed by George Telfer.
http://wn.com/Sir_John_Gielgud_A_Knight_in_the_Theatre
Stage Play - Sir John Gielgud reminisces about his life in this excerpt from the play "Gielgud - A Knight in the Theatre", written and performed by George Telfer.
- published: 06 Dec 2008
- views: 3011
- author: dv2broadcast
John Gielgud and James Mason in '11 Harrowhouse'
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:19
- Updated: 10 Aug 2012
John Gielgud disliked making movies in his early career, preferring to act Shakespeare and other great roles on the stage. However, in his later life he often took small roles that amounted to cameo parts in such films as '11 Harrowhouse' where he plays the head of the Diamond Exchange in London. Here a disgruntled employee (James Mason) who knows he is dying of cancer, conceals himself in the vault overnight so to as to assist an American burglar (Charles Grodin) in stealing the entire stock of diamonds. In this scene (which also features Jack Watling, Peter Vaughan and Jack Watson) Gielgud discovers that all his diamonds are missing. (From a 20th Century Fox film made in 1974 and issued on a Shout Factory DVD: uploaded as a tribute to Sir John Gielgud with all due acknowledgements.)
http://wn.com/John_Gielgud_and_James_Mason_in_'11_Harrowhouse'
John Gielgud disliked making movies in his early career, preferring to act Shakespeare and other great roles on the stage. However, in his later life he often took small roles that amounted to cameo parts in such films as '11 Harrowhouse' where he plays the head of the Diamond Exchange in London. Here a disgruntled employee (James Mason) who knows he is dying of cancer, conceals himself in the vault overnight so to as to assist an American burglar (Charles Grodin) in stealing the entire stock of diamonds. In this scene (which also features Jack Watling, Peter Vaughan and Jack Watson) Gielgud discovers that all his diamonds are missing. (From a 20th Century Fox film made in 1974 and issued on a Shout Factory DVD: uploaded as a tribute to Sir John Gielgud with all due acknowledgements.)
- published: 07 Aug 2012
- views: 1004
- author: adam28xx
Sonnet XVIII - John Gielgud
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:08
- Updated: 17 Aug 2010
Spoken by John Gielgud
http://wn.com/Sonnet_XVIII_John_Gielgud
Sir John Gielgud reads Christina Rossetti's 'A Birthday'
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 0:49
- Updated: 06 Nov 2012
John Gielgud reads Christina Rossetti's 'A Birthday'. Alec Guinness described Gielgud's voice like a 'silver trumpet muffled in silk'.
http://wn.com/Sir_John_Gielgud_reads_Christina_Rossetti's_'A_Birthday'
John Gielgud reads Christina Rossetti's 'A Birthday'. Alec Guinness described Gielgud's voice like a 'silver trumpet muffled in silk'.
- published: 12 Apr 2008
- views: 8704
- author: JimmyThatcher
The Tempest 4.1 (Gielgud) Prospero's Valediction
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:20
- Updated: 07 Mar 2012
From the LP "Sir John Gielgud in His Greatest Rôles", introduced by Sir Ralph Richardson. The first photo has Gielgud on the left and Richardson on the right. (But who's that fellow in the middle?) If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the 1991 visionary film "Prospero's Books", starring Gielgud. It's a love-it-or-hate-it sort of thing, but I was in the love-it camp. Unfortunately, it's prohibitively expensive and the current DVD is apparently of very poor quality, but the film itself is fantastic, so wait for it someday to be re-released: www.amazon.com Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. [Rack = "smoke, whisp of smoke, &c.;". Cf. German Rauch, Dutch Rook, Icelandic Reykur (Reykjavík = "Bay of Smokes"), &c.;] Selections from the album: I. Richardson on Gielgud and Gielgud on Hamlet: www.youtube.com II. Three Hamlet Soliloquies: www.youtube.com III. Hamlet (The Closet Scene with Gertrude): www.youtube.com IV. Three Richard II Speeches: www.youtube.com V. Lear (Cursing of Goneril): www.youtube.com VI. (This video.) VII. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind": www ...
http://wn.com/The_Tempest_41_Gielgud_Prospero's_Valediction
From the LP "Sir John Gielgud in His Greatest Rôles", introduced by Sir Ralph Richardson. The first photo has Gielgud on the left and Richardson on the right. (But who's that fellow in the middle?) If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend the 1991 visionary film "Prospero's Books", starring Gielgud. It's a love-it-or-hate-it sort of thing, but I was in the love-it camp. Unfortunately, it's prohibitively expensive and the current DVD is apparently of very poor quality, but the film itself is fantastic, so wait for it someday to be re-released: www.amazon.com Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep. [Rack = "smoke, whisp of smoke, &c.;". Cf. German Rauch, Dutch Rook, Icelandic Reykur (Reykjavík = "Bay of Smokes"), &c.;] Selections from the album: I. Richardson on Gielgud and Gielgud on Hamlet: www.youtube.com II. Three Hamlet Soliloquies: www.youtube.com III. Hamlet (The Closet Scene with Gertrude): www.youtube.com IV. Three Richard II Speeches: www.youtube.com V. Lear (Cursing of Goneril): www.youtube.com VI. (This video.) VII. Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind": www ...
- published: 27 Nov 2010
- views: 3194
- author: Aeschylus
William Shakespeare - Sonnet 15 - John Gielgud
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:07
- Updated: 17 Nov 2012
Sir John Gielgud reads Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 Sonnet 15 by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment, That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows Whereon the stars in secret influence comment; When I perceive that men as plants increase, Cheered and checked even by the selfsame sky, Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease, And wear their brave state out of memory: Then the conceit of this inconstant stay Sets you most rich in youth before my sight, Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay To change your day of youth to sullied night; And, all in war with Time for love of you, As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
http://wn.com/William_Shakespeare_Sonnet_15_John_Gielgud
Sir John Gielgud reads Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 Sonnet 15 by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment, That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows Whereon the stars in secret influence comment; When I perceive that men as plants increase, Cheered and checked even by the selfsame sky, Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease, And wear their brave state out of memory: Then the conceit of this inconstant stay Sets you most rich in youth before my sight, Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay To change your day of youth to sullied night; And, all in war with Time for love of you, As he takes from you, I engraft you new.
- published: 14 Feb 2012
- views: 269
- author: poetictouch2012
Jessie Matthews, John Gielgud & Max Miller in "The Good Companions"
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 13:15
- Updated: 25 Nov 2012
1933. This is SERIOUS Art Deco. Style, wit, beauty and sophistication - it's all there.
http://wn.com/Jessie_Matthews,_John_Gielgud_Max_Miller_in_The_Good_Companions
1933. This is SERIOUS Art Deco. Style, wit, beauty and sophistication - it's all there.
- published: 19 Dec 2010
- views: 3127
- author: ArtDecoChap
Sherlock Holmes "Empty House" 1 - Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:36
- Updated: 09 Nov 2012
(Part 1 of 3) Sir John Gielgud (Sherlock Holmes) and Sir Ralph Richardson (Dr. Watson) star in this old time radio show dramatization of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective story, The Empty House. The program aired on April 24, 1955. There were 16 shows total in this radio series. In the previous episode, it appeared that Sherlock Holmes and his arch nemesis, Dr. Moriarty (Orson Welles), both fell to their deaths. You can hear this episode here: www.youtube.com . Photo: Ralph Richardson and his good friend John Gielgud in a stage performance of Harold Pinter's play, No Man's Land, from the mid-1970s.
http://wn.com/Sherlock_Holmes_Empty_House_1_Ralph_Richardson,_John_Gielgud
(Part 1 of 3) Sir John Gielgud (Sherlock Holmes) and Sir Ralph Richardson (Dr. Watson) star in this old time radio show dramatization of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective story, The Empty House. The program aired on April 24, 1955. There were 16 shows total in this radio series. In the previous episode, it appeared that Sherlock Holmes and his arch nemesis, Dr. Moriarty (Orson Welles), both fell to their deaths. You can hear this episode here: www.youtube.com . Photo: Ralph Richardson and his good friend John Gielgud in a stage performance of Harold Pinter's play, No Man's Land, from the mid-1970s.
- published: 04 Jan 2010
- views: 4469
- author: rmm413d
Quartermaine's Terms 1/12 By Simon Gray. With Edward Fox, John Gielgud
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:28
- Updated: 20 Sep 2012
1987 film based on Simon Gray's successful West End play of the same year. Set in the 1960s at a school in Cambridge for the teaching of English to foreign students. The lives and problems of the characters half a dozen teachers and the assistant Headmaster Eddie are revealed in the teachers staffroom, which is the setting of most scenes. Terms as used in the title refers not only to Quartermaine himself but to the school terms which provide a structure for both the play and the characters lives. With Edward Fox (St.Joohn Quatermaine), John Gielgud (Eddie), Eleanor Bron (Melanie), Peter Jeffrey (Henry), Clive Francis (Mark), Paul Jesson (Derek) and Tessa Peake-Jones (Anita). This is taken from an old tape so sound and picture quality are not first-class.
http://wn.com/Quartermaine's_Terms_1_12_By_Simon_Gray_With_Edward_Fox,_John_Gielgud
1987 film based on Simon Gray's successful West End play of the same year. Set in the 1960s at a school in Cambridge for the teaching of English to foreign students. The lives and problems of the characters half a dozen teachers and the assistant Headmaster Eddie are revealed in the teachers staffroom, which is the setting of most scenes. Terms as used in the title refers not only to Quartermaine himself but to the school terms which provide a structure for both the play and the characters lives. With Edward Fox (St.Joohn Quatermaine), John Gielgud (Eddie), Eleanor Bron (Melanie), Peter Jeffrey (Henry), Clive Francis (Mark), Paul Jesson (Derek) and Tessa Peake-Jones (Anita). This is taken from an old tape so sound and picture quality are not first-class.
- published: 04 Oct 2008
- views: 5826
- author: Toddysfins
photo: AP / Jason DeCrow
16 Dec 2012
NEWTOWN, Conn ... Lanza blasted his way into the building and used a high-power rifle to kill 20 children and six adults, including the principal who tried to stop him, authorities said ... H ... John’s Episcopal Church, 54-year-old Donna Denner, an art teacher at an elementary school in nearby Danbury whose classroom was locked down after the shooting, said she feels the same way she did after 9/11 but isn’t sure the rest of the country does ... ....(size: 8.8Kb)
photo: AP / Guang Niu, Pool
16 Dec 2012
Retired Col. Gen. Viktor Yesin yesterday wrapped up a visit to the United States during which he met with officials at the Pentagon, State Department as well as members of Congress warning about underestimating China’s tactical nuclear weapons buildup ... Yesin warns that U.S. and Western arms specialists are dramatically underestimating China’s nuclear arsenal ... Somewhere between the higher and lower estimates is no doubt the truth ... Mr ... Mr ... ....(size: 4.0Kb)
photo: AP / Newtown Bee, Shannon Hicks
15 Dec 2012
Newtown, Conn. Twenty schoolchildren were slaughtered by a heavily armed gunman who opened fire at a suburban elementary school in Connecticut on Friday, ultimately killing at least 27 people including himself in the one of the worst mass shootings in US history ... Authorities found 18 children and seven adults, including the gunman, dead at the school, and two children were pronounced dead later after being taken to a hospital ... Reuters ....(size: 7.5Kb)
photo: AP / David Goldman
17 Dec 2012
WASHINGTON—Democrats say meaningful action in the wake of last week's elementary school shooting must include a ban on military-style assault weapons and a look at how the nation deals with individuals suffering from serious mental illness. Several Democratic lawmakers and Independent Sen ... Gun control was a hot topic in the early 1990s, when Congress enacted a 10-year ban on assault weapons ... He added ... Sen ... Rep ... ———....(size: 5.3Kb)
photo: AP / Jessica Hill
14 Dec 2012
More than two dozen people, mostly elementary school children, were shot and killed at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school this morning, federal and state sources tell ABC News. The massacre involved two gunmen at a Connecticut school this morning, prompting the town of Newtown to lock down all of its schools and draw SWAT teams to the school, authorities said today. State Police confirm that one shooter is dead ... at ABCNews.com ... ....(size: 4.5Kb)
New Straits/Business Times
15 Dec 2012
CREATIVE. Whoever was Shakespeare, he wrote great plays. He was a genius with wicked wits and outrageous puns. EVEN after his death 396 years ago, the world's interest in William Shakespeare has never waned ... He narrated stories in Shakespeare's dramas ... Those who doubted Shakespeare's authorship? No less than President Charles De Gaulle of France, comedian Charlie Chaplin, novelist Charles Dickens and a Shakespearean actor, John Gielgud ... ....(size: 4.3Kb)
IMDb
14 Dec 2012
... big screen was a place he unabashedly aspired to part of, much to the discontent of his seasoned theatrical co-star, including such eminent figures as John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier....(size: 1.0Kb)
noodls
14 Dec 2012
... and include many images of eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth century actors such as Sarah Siddons, Ellen Terry and John Gielgud as well as scenes and theatre interiors. Many actors are portrayed in character including David Garrick as Don Juan, Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Cardinal Wolsey in Henry Vlll and Dorothy Tutin as Joan of Arc....(size: 5.8Kb)
The Daily Telegraph
13 Dec 2012
A council has been criticised for wasting taxpayers' money after paying £600 for a councillor to take acting lessons so he could perform ceremonial duties more convincingly ... By Telegraph reporters. 9.44AM GMT 13 Dec 2012 ... A council source said ... Related Articles ... "They get enough training in the council chamber, standing up and shouting and making a scene – they don't need to sound like John Gielgud." ... . Council spending ... ....(size: 9.5Kb)
Fox31 Denver
12 Dec 2012
THE FILM.. The 1973 musical adaptation of James Hilton’s novel “Lost Horizon” is one of those movies I’ve heard about all my life but have never seen ... Then I started researching it. The 1973 film was an epic box office failure ... I mean REALLY close ... It isn’t the story ... It isn’t the acting. I mean, we have a top notch cast that includes John Gielgud, Liv Ullmann and Charles Boyer in addition to everyone else I’ve already listed ... THE DISC. ... ....(size: 6.1Kb)
The Examiner
10 Dec 2012
One actor, alone on stage ... Lily Tomlin, Ian McKellen, Ed Asner, Tovah Feldshuh (‘Golda’s Balcony’), Frank Ferrante (‘An Evening With Groucho’), Eve Ensler (‘The Vagina Monologues’), Hershey Felder (‘George Gershwin Alone’), Heather Woodbury, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Ruth Draper, John Gielgud are among the many solo artists whose work is discussed ... More from Jordan.. Acting solo at Hollywood Fringe, on DVD by McKellen, Gielgud ... ....(size: 3.2Kb)
The Telegraph India
07 Dec 2012
Canberra Times
30 Nov 2012
In playing Caesar - born Gaius Julius Caesar in the year 100BC - Lasance joins an eclectic group of actors who have portrayed the iconic Roman general, including Rex Harrison, who played him in the 1963 film Cleopatra, opposite Elizabeth Taylor, and John Gielgud, who played him in the 1970's Julius Caesar....(size: 2.6Kb)
Wall Street Journal
28 Nov 2012
By RICHARD HOLLEDGE. London. In 1939 Cecil Beaton cut a restless, dissatisfied figure ... Cecil Beaton.. Theatre of War. Imperial War Museums. Through Jan. 1 ... He had returned to England from New York, war was imminent, and he wanted to do his bit. But what? ... In 1945, with the conflict coming to an end, Beaton was asked by the actor John Gielgud to design the costumes for a production of "Lady Windermere's Fan" that was to run on Broadway ... Roberts....(size: 6.3Kb)
The Guardian
27 Nov 2012
Kean, Siddons, Evans, Ashcroft, Gielgud, McKellen and Dench are all names to conjure. But there are plenty of rising thespians with the talent to join the list of the British stage's previous and current acting greats. Scene change … Anne-Marie Duff in Cause Célèbre at London's Old Vic. Photograph ... "We shall not see his like again – it is the end of an era," declared Dame Maggie Smith on the death of Sir John Gielgud in 2000 ... ....(size: 3.5Kb)
The Washington Times
25 Nov 2012
Joseph Cotto. Ask me a question. FLORIDA, November 25, 2012 — Photography is an art unlike any other. There is something profound to be said about capturing a single moment in time and preserving it for countless more. ... Joseph F. Cotto ... Allan Warren ... Cotto ... Warren. ... Warren ... At the time I was acting in an Alan Bennett play in the West End called “Forty Years On” starring Sir John Gielgud ... Cotto ... Warren ... Cotto ... ....(size: 9.2Kb)
The Guardian
24 Nov 2012
What links worms with butterflies, twine, tongues, pens and shells? Spoiler alert. answers below (don't cheat!). Worm teaser… Is the answer wriggling away from you? Photograph. Graham Turner for the Guardian. The questions. 1 What is the shortest book to win the Booker prize? ... 7 "Uncensored. Uninhibited ... 11 Rex Harrison; John Gielgud; Kenneth Williams; Ciarán Hinds? ... ....(size: 2.6Kb)
Independent online (SA)
23 Nov 2012
“And may we make a request for privacy as we cherish his memory.” ... It was made into a successful movie starring Stephen Dorff, John Gielgud, and Morgan Freeman, with James Bond star Daniel Craig appearing in his first major film role ... He knew he was dying and in a moving epilogue in the book he wrote ... ....(size: 1.7Kb)
| John Gielgud | |
|---|---|
 Gielgud in 1973, by Allan Warren |
|
| Born | Arthur John Gielgud (1904-04-14)14 April 1904 South Kensington, London, England |
| Died | 21 May 2000(2000-05-21) (aged 96) Wotton Underwood, Buckinghamshire, England |
| Occupation | Actor, singer, director |
| Years active | 1924–2000 |
| Partner | Martin Hensler (ca. 1963–1998) |
Sir Arthur John Gielgud, OM, CH (/ˈɡiːlɡʊd/; 14 April 1904 – 21 May 2000) was an English actor, director, and producer. A descendant of the renowned Terry acting family, he achieved early international acclaim for his youthful, emotionally expressive Hamlet which broke box office records on Broadway in 1937. He was known for his beautiful speaking of verse and particularly for his warm and expressive voice, which his colleague Sir Alec Guinness likened to "a silver trumpet muffled in silk".[1][2] Gielgud is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
Contents |
Birth and family background[link]
John Gielgud was born in South Kensington in London to Kate Terry and Frank Gielgud. He was of theatrical lineage on his mother's side, being the grandson of actress Kate Terry, whose actor-siblings included Ellen Terry, Marion Terry and Fred Terry.[3]
Gielgud's Catholic father, Franciszek Giełgud, born in 1880, was a descendant of a Polish noble family residing at a manor in a town called Giełgudyszki (now Gelgaudiškis in Marijampolė County, Lithuania). In his autobiography, Gielgud states repeatedly and clearly that his father was Polish Catholic, and mentions Gelgaudiškis as being his ancestral home whence his family and their surname originated.
His elder brother Val came to be a pioneering influence in BBC Radio. His brother Lewis was a scholar, writer, intelligence officer and humanitarian worker. His niece Maina Gielgud is a dancer and one time artistic director of the Australian Ballet and the Royal Danish Ballet.[3][4]
Career[link]
Early stages[link]
After Hillside Preparatory School in Godalming, Surrey, and Westminster School, where he gained a King's Scholarship, Gielgud trained briefly at RADA and understudied Noël Coward in Coward's The Vortex at the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead under the direction of Norman MacDermott (1890–1977). He had his initial success as a stage actor in classical roles, first winning stardom during a successful two seasons at the Old Vic Theatre from 1929 to 1931 where his performances as Richard II and Hamlet were particularly acclaimed, the latter being the first Old Vic production to be transferred to the West End for a run. He returned to the role of Hamlet in a famous production under his own direction in 1934 at the New Theatre in the West End. He was hailed as a Broadway star in Guthrie McClintic's production in which Lillian Gish played Ophelia in 1936. (The production's popularity was assisted when a rival staging featuring film star Leslie Howard opened shortly afterward and was critically denounced in comparison to Gielgud's. Gielgud's production broke the long-run record for a Broadway "Hamlet.") There followed a 1939 production that Gielgud again directed at the Lyceum Theatre, historic for having been the professional home for Henry Irving's company. This was the last production to play the Lyceum until 50 years later when it was restored to host, among other shows, the hit musical The Lion King. Gielgud's Hamlet was later taken to Elsinore Castle in Denmark (the actual setting of the play), there was a 1944 production directed by George Rylands, and finally a 1945 production that toured the Far East under Gielgud's own direction. In his later years, Gielgud played the Ghost of Hamlet's Father in productions of the play, first to Richard Burton's Melancholy Dane on the Broadway stage which Gielgud directed in 1964, then on television with Richard Chamberlain, and finally in a radio production starring Gielgud's protégé Kenneth Branagh.
Gielgud had triumphs in many other plays, notably his greatest popular success Richard of Bordeaux (1933) (a romantic version of the story of Richard II), The Importance of Being Earnest which he first performed at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1930 and which remained in his repertory until 1947, and a legendary production of Romeo and Juliet (1935) which Gielgud directed and alternated the roles of Romeo and Mercutio with a young Laurence Olivier in his first professional Shakespearean leading role. Olivier's performance won him an engagement as the leading man of the Old Vic Theatre the following season, starting his career as a classical actor, but he was said to have resented Gielgud's direction and developed a wary relationship with Gielgud which resulted in Olivier turning down Gielgud's request to play the Chorus in Olivier's film of Henry V and later doing his best to block Gielgud from appearing at the Royal National Theatre when Olivier was its director.[5]
Queen's Theatre season[link]
Gielgud had hoped to stay in America after his Broadway performance as Hamlet in 1936 to play Richard II in New York, but director Guthrie McClintic was so certain that the production would fail in the United States that Gielgud gave up the idea (and was dismayed when Maurice Evans had a legendary success in the play on Broadway after Gielgud gave him his blessing to mount it when he decided not to).
However much Gielgud may have wished to stay in America, his return to London in 1937 had an enormous influence on the development of English Theatre. In 1937/38, he brought his celebrity and talent to bear in producing a season of plays at the Queen's Theatre, presenting the aforementioned Richard II, The School for Scandal, Three Sisters, and The Merchant of Venice with a permanent company that included himself, Peggy Ashcroft, Michael Redgrave and Alec Guinness. Although not always acknowledged for this achievement, Gielgud set a precedent in establishing a company of actors gathered together to present classics. This effort proved it could be done and shaped the development of such future theatrical institutions as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. Gielgud acted in all four productions and directed the two Shakespeare plays, while Tyrone Guthrie directed The School for Scandal and Michael Saint-Denis staged Three Sisters. From Sheridan Morley's authorised biography: "Accustomed as we have now become to...the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, it is almost impossible to conceive how revolutionary John's idea was for the West End of 1937, where there had simply been nothing like it since the heyday of Henry Irving and the actor-managers more than fifty years earlier." Laurence Olivier said that Gielgud's performance in The School for Scandal was "the best light comedy performance I have ever seen - or ever shall!" and considered his Shylock to be among his greatest impersonations, but the greatest success of the season was the production of Three Sisters. That production went far toward Gielgud's successful effort to establish Chekhov's's viability on the English-speaking stage. Gielgud's own performance as Vershinin, along with his past successes as Treplev in The Seagull (1929 and 1936), and his later work in The Cherry Orchard (1954), and Ivanov (1965) were part of that Chekhovian legacy.
Shakespearean legacy[link]
It has always been, however, for his Shakespearean work that Gielgud has been best known. In addition to Hamlet, which he played over 500 times in six productions, he gave what some consider definitive performances in The Tempest (as Prospero) in four productions (and in the 1991 film Prospero's Books), as well as in other roles - Richard II in three productions, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing which he first played in 1930 and revived throughout the 1950s, Macbeth and Oberon in A Midsummer Night's Dream twice, Romeo three times, and King Lear four times (as well as taking on the part for a final time in a radio broadcast at the age of 90). He also had triumphs as Malvolio in Twelfth Night (1931), Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1937), Angelo in Measure for Measure (1950), Cassius in Julius Caesar (1950) (which he immortalised in the 1953 film), Leontes in The Winter's Tale (1951), and Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII (1959) (although his 1960 performance as Othello was not a success). It became rumoured that Gielgud also provided the voice for the uncredited role of the Ghost of Hamlet's Father in Laurence Olivier's 1948 film version, but the voice was actually that of Olivier, electronically distorted. Gielgud did voice the Ghost in both the stage and film version of the Richard Burton Hamlet, which he directed in 1964, and in the 1970 Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation starring Richard Chamberlain.
Gielgud's crowning achievement, many believe, was Ages of Man, his one-man recital of Shakespearean excerpts which he performed throughout the 1950s and 1960s, winning a Tony Award for the Broadway production, a Grammy Award for his recording of the piece, and an Emmy Award for producer David Susskind for the 1966 telecast on CBS. Gielgud made his final Shakespearean appearance on stage in 1977 in the title role of John Schlesinger's production of Julius Caesar at the Royal National Theatre. He also made a recording of many of Shakespeare's sonnets in 1963. Among his non-Shakespearean Renaissance roles, his Ferdinand in John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi was well-known.
Later stage work[link]
As he aged, Gielgud sought out distinctive new voices in the theatre, appearing in plays by Edward Albee (Tiny Alice), Alan Bennett (Forty Years On), Charles Wood (Veterans), Edward Bond (Bingo, in which Gielgud played William Shakespeare), David Storey (Home), and Harold Pinter (No Man's Land), the latter two in partnership with his old friend Ralph Richardson, but he drew the line at being offered the role of Hamm in Beckett's Endgame, saying that the play offered "nothing but loneliness and despair".[6] It looked as though Gielgud would retire from the stage after appearing in Half Life at the Duke of York's Theatre in 1978, but he made a successful comeback in 1988 in Hugh Whitemore's play The Best of Friends as museum curator Sydney Cockerell.
Directing career[link]
Gielgud was almost as highly regarded for his work as a theatre director as for his acting, having staged his first production as a guest director of the Oxford University Dramatic Society production of Romeo and Juliet in 1932. The custom of OUDS at the time was to cast student undergraduates in the male roles and professional actresses in the female roles. Gielgud engaged Peggy Ashcroft as Juliet and Edith Evans as the nurse, who played the same roles three years later in his legendary production of the play at the New Theatre.
Gielgud quickly rose to the status of being one of the top directors for Binkie Beaumont's H.M. Tennent, Ltd. production company in London's West End Theatre and later on Broadway, his productions including Lady Windermere's Fan (1945), The Glass Menagerie (1948), The Heiress (1949), his own adaptation of The Cherry Orchard (1954), The Potting Shed (1958), Five Finger Exercise (1959), Peter Ustinov's comedy Half Way Up a Tree (1967), and Private Lives (1972). Gielgud won a Tony Award for his direction of Big Fish, Little Fish in 1961, the only time he won the award in a competitive category (having won honorary awards for "Best Foreign Company" for his 1947 production of The Importance of Being Earnest and for his one-man show Ages of Man). He also directed the operas The Trojans in 1957 and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1960.
Gielgud directed other actors in many of the Shakespearean roles that he was famous for playing, notably Richard Burton as Hamlet (1964), Anthony Quayle as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (1950), and Paul Scofield as the title role in Richard II (1952). But Gielgud didn't always have the magic touch, staging a disappointing revival of Twelfth Night with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 1955 and a disastrous production of Macbeth with Ralph Richardson in 1952.
But Gielgud was best known for directing productions in which he also starred, including his greatest commercial success Richard of Bordeaux (1933), his definitive production of The Importance of Being Earnest (1939, 1942, 1947), Medea with Judith Anderson's Tony Award-winning performance of the title role with Gielgud supporting her as Jason (1947), The Lady's Not for Burning (1949) that won Richard Burton his first notoriety as an actor, and Ivanov (1965). But many believed that his greatest successes were in Shakespearean productions in which he both directed and starred, especially Romeo and Juliet (1935), Richard II (1937, 1953), King Lear (1950, 1955), Much Ado About Nothing (1952, 1955, 1959) and his signature role of Hamlet (1934, 1939, 1945).
Radio work[link]
Gielgud's brother Val Gielgud became the head of BBC Radio Production in 1928,[7] and John made his radio debut there the following year in a version of Pirandello's The Man With the Flower in His Mouth, which he was then performing at the Old Vic Theatre. In the ensuing years, John played many of his greatest stage roles on BBC Radio including Richard of Bordeaux, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Tempest, and Hamlet, one production of which featured Emlyn Williams as Claudius, Celia Johnson as Ophelia, and Martita Hunt as Gertrude (the part she played in Gielgud's debut in the role at the Old Vic in 1930). He also played some Shakespearean roles which he never essayed on stage, such as Iago in a 1932 broadcast of Othello opposite Henry Ainley as the Moor, Buckingham (1954)[8] and Cranmer (1977) in Henry VIII, and Friar Laurence in Romeo & Juliet for the first time when he was eighty-nine.
John Gielgud played Sherlock Holmes for BBC radio in the 1950s, with Ralph Richardson as Watson. Gielgud's brother, Val Gielgud, appeared in one of the episodes, perhaps inevitably, as the great detective's brother Mycroft. This series was co-produced by the American Broadcasting Company. Orson Welles appeared as Professor Moriarty in The Final Problem.
Gielgud gave one of his final radio performances in the title role of an All Star production of King Lear in 1994 that was mounted to celebrate his 90th birthday. The cast included Judi Dench, Kenneth Branagh, Derek Jacobi, and Simon Russell Beale.
Film work[link]
Although he began to appear in British films as early as 1924, making his debut in Who Is the Man? and appearing in the Edgar Wallace-based thriller The Clue of the New Pin (1929), he did not make an international impact in the medium until the last decades of his life. His early important film roles included Inigo Jollifant in Victor Saville's The Good Companions (1933), the lead in Alfred Hitchcock's Secret Agent (1936), Benjamin Disraeli in The Prime Minister (1940), Cassius in Julius Caesar (1953) (BAFTA Award for Best British Actor), George, Duke of Clarence to Olivier's Richard III (1955), and Henry IV to Orson Welles' Falstaff in Chimes at Midnight (1966). A brief glimpse of his Hamlet from the gravediggers scene appears in the Humphrey Jennings short A Diary for Timothy (1945). But he lost his aversion to filming in the late 1960s, and by the 1980s and 1990s he was appearing in films so regularly that it was jokingly said that he was prepared to do almost anything for his art. He won an Academy Award for his supporting role as a sardonic butler in the 1981 comedy Arthur, starring Dudley Moore and Liza Minnelli, a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Providence (1977), and a BAFTA Award for Murder on the Orient Express (1974), and his performances in The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), The Elephant Man (1981), and Shine (1996) were critically acclaimed. In 1980, he played the role of Nerva in the Penthouse-funded film Caligula. In 1991, Gielgud was able to satisfy his life's ambition by immortalising his Prospero on screen in Peter Greenaway's extremely offbeat version of The Tempest, a film called Prospero's Books in which Gielgud voiced every single character in the play.[9]
Television also developed as one of the focal points of his career, with Gielgud giving a particularly notable performance in Brideshead Revisited (1981). He won an Emmy Award for Summer's Lease (1989) and televised his stage performances of A Day by the Sea (1957), Home (1970), No Man's Land (1976) and his final theatre role in The Best of Friends as Sydney Cockerell in the 1991 Masterpiece Theatre Production, along with Patrick McGoohan and Dame Wendy Hiller. In 1983, he made his second onscreen appearance with fellow theatrical knights Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson (following Olivier's own Richard III) in a television miniseries about composer Richard Wagner. In 1996 he played a wizard in the TV adaptation of Gulliver's Travels. Gielgud and Ralph Richardson were the first guest stars on Second City Television. Playing themselves, they were in Toronto during their tour of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land. According to Dave Thomas, in his book, SCTV: Behind the Scenes, their sketch was very poor and the actors gave bad performances. Gielgud's final television performance was on film in Merlin in 1998, his final television studio appearance having been in A Summer Day's Dream recorded in 1994 for the BBC 2 Performance series.[10]
Gielgud was one of the few people who has won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award.
Gielgud's final onscreen appearance in a major release motion picture was as Pope Pius V in Elizabeth which was released in 1998. His final (silent) acting performance was in a film adaptation of Samuel Beckett's short play Catastrophe, opposite longtime collaborator Harold Pinter and directed by American playwright David Mamet; Gielgud died mere weeks after production was completed at the age of 96 of natural causes.
Personal life[link]
Gielgud lived and worked in an era when there was a conspiracy of silence around homosexuality outside of theatrical circles. Shortly after he was knighted, Gielgud endured a horrific humiliation. In 1953, he was convicted of "persistently importuning for immoral purposes" (cottaging) in a Chelsea mews, having been arrested for trying to pick up a man in a public lavatory.[11][12] Gielgud avoided Hollywood for over a decade for fear of being denied entry because of the arrest. There was much discussion behind closed doors about whether his career could endure the ignominy, but he continued to rehearse the play in which he was scheduled to direct and act. Instead of being rejected by the public, he received a standing ovation at the play's initial opening in Liverpool, in part because of his co-star Sybil Thorndike; Thorndike seized him as he stood in the wings unable to bring himself to make his first entrance and brought him onstage, whispering "Come on, John darling, they won't boo me." Biographer Sheridan Morley writes that while Gielgud never denied being homosexual, he always tried to be discreet about it and felt humiliated by the ordeal. Some speculate that it helped to bring to public attention a crusade to decriminalise homosexuality in England and Wales.[13][14]
The 'Gielgud case' of 1953, above, was dramatised by critic turned playwright Nicholas de Jongh in the play Plague Over England and performed at the Finborough, a small London theatre, in 2008, with Jasper Britton as Gielgud. In 2009 the play was presented for a limited run at the Duchess Theatre, in London's West End, with Michael Feast (who had worked with Gielgud) in the main role.[13]
Gielgud's long-standing professional relationship with producer Hugh "Binkie" Beaumont had its personal side as well. Gielgud's first significant lover, playwright John Perry, left Gielgud for Beaumont. Later, Perry went on to partner Beaumont in the H. M. Tennent organisation, within which Gielgud continued to work. Beaumont, himself closeted outside the theatrical community, was a very powerful producer who oversaw a great deal of high-profile and artistically ambitious work. He stood behind Gielgud during the 1953 scandal, and, with Perry, took the risk of backing Gielgud's Queen's Theatre season. However, Morley's biography states: "Binkie...was..to keep him.....on such an extremely tight salary that it wasn't until Gielgud first escaped to Hollywood in 1953 that he began to earn the kind of money that Olivier and Richardson and Redgrave had earned for decades."
In the same biography, Keith Baxter remarks on Gielgud's private life: "...the theatre was always much more important to John G. than any private relationship..."
Longtime partner Martin Hensler died in December 1998, 16 months before Gielgud's own death in 2000.[15] He publicly acknowledged Hensler as his lover only in 1988, in the programme notes for The Best of Friends, which was his final stage performance. Sir John gave the opening address at the Queen Mother's's 90th Birthday Celebration Gala at the London Palladium in 1990, referring to a glittering array of stars and personalities assembled saying that because of the love and affection in which she was held they were laying at her feet, this rather large Birthday present, which provoked tremendous approval. He also read from Alan Bennett's Forty Years On, in which he had appeared in earlier years.[16][17]
Laurence Olivier's friendship with Gielgud was peppered with barely acknowledged competitive tension, for, while Olivier's fame as a film actor eventually eclipsed Gielgud's, Gielgud had been the great Shakespearean actor when Olivier was just coming up and that was hard for Olivier to forget. Gielgud maintained a very close relationship with Olivier's second wife, Vivien Leigh, throughout their marriage, divorce, and her long struggle with manic depression. In Curtain (1991), Michael Korda's novel based on the marriage of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Gielgud becomes Philip Chagrin.
Another fictionalised Gielgud – this time given the family name John Terry – appeared around the same time as de Jongh's play in Nicola Upson's detective novel An Expert in Murder, a crime story woven around the original production of Richard of Bordeaux.
John Gielgud died of a respiratory infection and was cremated at Oxford Crematorium.
Awards and honours[link]
- He was knighted in the 1953 coronation honours, became a Companion of Honour in 1977, and was admitted to the Order of Merit in 1996.
- The National Portrait Gallery, London commissioned artist David Remfry to paint a portrait of Sir John for the collection in 1980, which now holds 112 likenesses of Gielgud in its collections.
- The Globe Theatre in London was renamed the Gielgud Theatre in 1994 in his honour.
[edit] Laurence Olivier Awards
- 1985: Special Award
[edit] Academy Awards
- 1964: Nominated for Best Supporting Actor, for Becket
- 1981: Winner for Best Supporting Actor, for Arthur
[edit] Emmy Awards
- 1966: Emmy for Outstanding Dramatic Program, for Gielgud's Ages of Man
- 1982: Nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Special, for Brideshead Revisited
- 1984: Nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Special, for The Master of Ballantrae
- 1985: Nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Special, for Romance on the Orient Express
- 1989: Nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a miniseries or Special, for War and Remembrance
- 1991: Winner for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or Movie, for Summer's Lease
[edit] Tony Awards
- 1948: Winner for Outstanding Foreign Company, The Importance of Being Earnest
- 1959: Winner, Special Award, for contribution to theatre for his extraordinary insight into the writings of Shakespeare as demonstrated in his one-man show, Ages of Man
- 1961: Winner for Best Director (Dramatic), for Big Fish, Little Fish, a play by Hugh Wheeler
- 1963: Nominated for Best Director (Dramatic), for The School for Scandal
- 1965: Nominated for Best Actor (Dramatic), for Tiny Alice
- 1971: Nominated for Best Actor (Dramatic), for Home
[edit] Evening Standard Awards
- 1970 Co-winner for Best Actor for Home (with Ralph Richardson)
- 1975 Winner for Best Actor for No Man's Land
- 1982 Winner, Special Award for Lifetime Achievement
[edit] Grammy Awards
- 1959: Nominated for Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording, for Ages of Man
- 1964: Nominated for Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording, for Hamlet with Richard Burton, Hume Cronyn, Alfred Drake, George Voskovec, Eileen Herlie, William Redfield and George Rose
- 1964: Nominated for Best Documentary or Spoken Word Recording, for Ages of Man, Volume 2 (One Man in His Time) Part Two - Shakespeare
- 1979: Winner for Best Spoken Word, Documentary or Drama Recording, for Ages of Man - Recordings from Shakespeare
- 1982: Nominated for Best Spoken Word, Documentary or Drama Recording, for No Man's Land with Ralph Richardson
- 1983: Nominated for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Recording, for Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats with Irene Worth
- 1986: Nominated for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Recording, for Gulliver
- 1988: Nominated for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Recording, for A Christmas Carol
- 1989: Nominated for Best Spoken Word or Non-Musical Recording, for Sir John Gielgud Reads Alice in Wonderland
- 1991: Nominated for Best Album for Children, for The Emperor's New Clothes with Mark Isham
[edit] New York Film Critics Circle Awards
- 1977: Best Actor, for Providence
- 1981: Best Supporting Actor, for Arthur
[edit] Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards
[edit] Golden Globe Awards
- 1981: Winner for Best Supporting Actor, for Arthur
- 1988: Winner for Best Supporting Actor in a Series, Mini-series or Motion Picture Made for Television, for War and Remembrance
- 1989: Nominated for Best Actor in a Mini-series or Motion Picture Made for Television, for War and Remembrance
There is also the Sir John Gielgud Award for "Excellence in the Dramatic Arts" presented by the US-based Shakespeare Guild. Past winners include Ian McKellen, Kenneth Branagh, Glen Joseph, Kevin Kline and Judi Dench
Other interests[link]
Sir John Gielgud believed that animals should not be exploited. He was particularly fond of birds and joined PETA's campaign against the foie gras industry in the early 1990s, narrating PETA's video exposé of the force-feeding of geese and ducks. Many chefs and restaurateurs who saw that video dropped foie gras from their menus. Sir John received PETA's Humanitarian of the Year Award twice, in 1994 and 1999.[18]
Following his death it was revealed that late in his life he had made financial contributions to the lobby group Stonewall, but had insisted that his support not be made public.[19]
He also authored several books, including his memoirs in An Actor and His Time, Early Stages and Distinguished Company. He also co-wrote, with John Miller, Acting Shakespeare.
Selected filmography[link]
- Who Is the Man? (1924)
- Insult (1932)
- The Good Companions (1933)
- Secret Agent (1936)
- Julius Caesar (1953)
- Richard III (1955)
- Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)
- Saint Joan (1957)
- The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957)
- Becket (1964)
- Hamlet (1964)
- Chimes at Midnight (1965)
- The Loved One (1965)
- Sebastian (1968)
- The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968)
- Oh! What a Lovely War (1969)
- Julius Caesar (1970)
- Eagle in a Cage (1972)
- Lost Horizon (1973)
- Frankenstein: The True Story (1973)
- 11 Harrowhouse (1974)
- Murder on the Orient Express (1974)
- Gold (1974)
- Aces High (1976)
- The Picture Of Dorian Gray (1976)
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1977)
- Providence (1977)
- Caligula (1979)
- The Human Factor (1979)
- The Orchestra Conductor (1980)
- The Elephant Man (1980)
- The Formula (1980)
- Lion of the Desert (1981)
- Arthur (1981)
- Chariots of Fire (1981)
- Gandhi (1982)
- Wagner (1983)
- The Wicked Lady (1983)
- The Scarlet and The Black (1983)
- The Master of Ballantrae (1984)
- The Far Pavilions (1984)
- The Shooting Party (1985)
- Plenty (1985)
- The Canterville Ghost (1986)
- Time After Time (1986)
- The Whistle Blower (1986)
- Appointment with Death (1988)
- War and Remembrance (1988)
- Arthur 2: On the Rocks (1988)
- Getting it Right (1989)
- Prospero's Books (1991)
- Shining Through (1992)
- Swan Song (1992)
- The Power of One (1992)
- Scarlett (1994)
- First Knight (1995)
- Haunted (1995)
- The Portrait of a Lady (1996 film) (1996)
- Hamlet (1996)
- Shine (1996)
- Merlin (1998)
- Elizabeth (1998)
- Quest for Camelot (1998)
- Catastrophe (2000)
John Gielgud in popular culture[link]
Gielgud is referenced in Bruce Robinson's 1986 cult film Withnail and I. In an early scene in which Withnail is complaining about his lack of work as an actor, Marwood attempts to console him by suggesting that September is a "bad patch" for actors. Withnail responds by saying "Rubbish! Haven't seen Gielgud down the labour exchange. Oh, why doesn't he retire?"
In the Australian satirical news television show Newstopia, Shaun Micallef's impersonation of Gielgud acts as the African correspondent.
In the satirical puppet comedy Spitting Image, Gielgud was regularly shown in a short segment where he poetically read a nursery rhyme or other short stanza and then fell asleep immediately after. He was also mocked in other sketches.
As of early 2009, there is currently a West End play running based on a section of Gielgud's life titled Plague Over England, starring Celia Imrie and Michael Feast.
In the book Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend, Adrian names the swan that terrorises him outside his apartment Gielgud as he believes they share similar physical attributes.
In the book The Dark Tower VI: Song of Susannah by Stephen King, Eddie Dean remembers hearing an audiobook version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy read by Gielgud back when he was younger and lived with his brother Henry.
Sideshow Mel, a character on the television show The Simpsons, in the episode titled "The Man in Blue Flannel Pants" tells Bart, Milhouse, and Milhouse's dad that John Gielgud was more of a father to him than his own father.
See also[link]
- List of people who have won Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony Awards
- Terry family
- The Gielgud Theatre, formerly the Hicks Theatre, renamed in Gielgud's honour in 1994.
References[link]
- ^ Robertson, Nan. "A Reticent Alec Guinness Awaits a Movie Tribute;" The New York Times, 27 April 1987. Retrieved 22 May 2008.
- ^ Clarke, Gerald. "Alec Guinness Takes Off His Masks;" Time, 17 March 1986. Retrieved 22 May 2008.
- ^ a b "The Gielgud-Terry Family Tree", Gielgud, John and John Miller. An Actor and His Time, p. 180, Legends Series, Hal Leonard Corporation, 2000 ISBN 1-55783-415-6
- ^ Croall, Jonathan. "Gielgud: A Theatrical Life", The New York Times, 12 August 2001, accessed 9 March 2012
- ^ (Croall 2002)
- ^ (Morley 2002, p. 311)
- ^ (Croall 2002, p. 179)
- ^ (Croall 2002, p. 180)
- ^ Sir John Gielgud: A Life in Letters, Arcade Publishing (2004).
- ^ "International Movie Database (A Summer's Day Dream)". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059059/. Retrieved 28 February 2009.
- ^ "Fine For "Persistently Importuning"". The Times (UK): p. 5. 22 October 1953.
- ^ Munn, Michael (1 October 2007), Lord Larry: the secret life of Laurence Olivier : a personal and intimate portrait, Anova Books, p. 165, ISBN 978-1-86105-977-2, http://books.google.com/?id=-IrgcXteIMgC
- ^ a b Koenig, Rhoda (28 February 2008). "John Gielgud: When England hounded a hero". The Independent (UK: The Independent). http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/john-gielgud-when-england-hounded-a-hero-788459.html. Retrieved 7 August 2010. "The fuss contributed to the Wolfenden Commission, set up the following year to study prostitution, taking on homosexuality as well. Its recommendations eventually led to decriminalisation."
- ^ Roberts, Glenys (20 March 2008). "How a moment of madness by Britain's greatest actor drove him to the brink of suicide - and forever changed attitudes to sex". Daily Mail (UK: Associated Newspapers). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-540192/How-moment-madness-Britains-greatest-actor-drove-brink-suicide--forever-changed-attitudes-sex.html. Retrieved 7 August 2010. "Yet, ironically, the publicity surrounding Gielgud's arrest was one of the impetuses behind changes in the law over homosexuality. The Wolfenden Commission, set up to study prostitution, broadened its scope to include homosexuality."
- ^ Sheridan Morley: John Gielgud: The Authorized Biography (London, 2002), p.23
- ^ Rich, Frank (12 February 1988). "Stage: John Gielgud Stars in London Play". The New York Times. http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=940DEEDA1638F931A25751C0A96E948260. Retrieved 25 December 2006.
- ^ "Gielgud, 83, comes out", Gay Times (Millivres) (114), March 1988, ISSN 0950-6101.
- ^ Peta foie gras. The Observer Magazine. 22 June 2003.
- ^ Hastings, Chris (2 July 2000). "Gielgud revealed as secret donor to gay rights campaigners". The Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1346137/Gielgud-revealed-as-secret-donor-to-gay-rights-campaigners.html. Retrieved 22 August 2009.
Bibliography[link]
- Croall, Jonathan (12 April 2002), Gielgud: A Theatrical Life 1904-2000, Continuum, p. 608, ISBN 978-0-8264-1403-8, http://books.google.com/?id=FCIHAAAACAAJ
- Gielgud, John; Mangan, Richard (1994), John Gielgud's notes from the gods : playgoing in the twenties, Nick Hern, ISBN 978-1-85459-105-0, http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/31078159
- Gielgud, John; Mangan, Richard (2004-04), Richard Mangan, ed., Sir John Gielgud: a life in letters, Arcade Publishing, p. 598, ISBN 978-1-55970-729-9, http://books.google.com/?id=dRedHihfkJAC
- Morley, Sheridan (2002), John Gielgud: the Authorised Biography, Simon & Schuster, p. 528, ISBN 978-0-7432-2242-6, http://books.google.com/?id=HUdOdkY7_x4C
- Young, Jordan R. (1989), Acting solo: the art of one-man shows, Moonstone Press, p. 224, ISBN 978-0-940410-85-5, http://books.google.com/?id=9qlZAAAAMAAJ
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- John Gielgud at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
- Gielgud Archive in the British Library Manuscripts Collections
- Theatre Profiles - Sir John Gielgud
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Gielgud, John |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | English actor, director, and producer |
| Date of birth | 1904-04-14 |
| Place of birth | South Kensington, London, England, UK |
| Date of death | 2000-05-21 |
| Place of death | Wotton Underwood, Buckinghamshire, England, UK |
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For other people named Richard Burton, see Richard Burton (disambiguation).
| Richard Burton | |
|---|---|
.jpg) In Cleopatra (1963) This file is nominated for deletion. See commons:Commons:Deletion requests/File:Burton, Richard (Cleopatra).jpg |
|
| Born | Richard Walter Jenkins (1925-11-10)10 November 1925 Pontrhydyfen, Wales |
| Died | 5 August 1984(1984-08-05) (aged 58) Céligny, Switzerland |
| Cause of death | Cerebral haemorrhage |
| Nationality | Welsh |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1944–84 |
| Spouse | Sybil Williams (1949–63; divorced) Elizabeth Taylor (1964–74, 1975–76; divorced) Suzy Hunt (1976–82; divorced) Sally Hay (1983–84; his death) |
| Children | Kate Burton Jessica Burton Liza Todd Burton Maria Burton |
| Signature |  |
Richard Burton, CBE (10 November 1925 – 5 August 1984) was a Welsh actor.[1] He was nominated seven times for an Academy Award, six of which were for Best Actor in a Leading Role (without ever winning), and was a recipient of BAFTA, Golden Globe and Tony Awards for Best Actor. Although never trained as an actor, Burton was, at one time, the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. He remains closely associated in the public consciousness with his second wife, actress Elizabeth Taylor; the couple's turbulent relationship was rarely out of the news.[2]
Contents |
Childhood and education[link]
Richard Burton was born Richard Walter Jenkins in the village of Pontrhydyfen, Neath Port Talbot, Wales. He grew up in a working class, Welsh-speaking household, the twelfth of thirteen children.[3] His father, Richard Walter Jenkins, was a short, robust coal miner, a "twelve-pints-a-day man" who sometimes went off on drinking and gambling sprees for weeks. Burton later claimed, by family telling, that "He looked very much like me...That is, he was pockmarked, devious, and smiled a great deal when he was in trouble. He was, also, a man of extraordinary eloquence, tremendous passion, great violence."[4]:23
Burton was less than two years old in 1927 when his mother, Edith Maude (née Thomas), died at the age of 43[5]:2 after giving birth to her 13th child.[6] His sister Cecilia and her husband Elfed took him into their Presbyterian mining family in nearby Port Talbot (an English-speaking steel town).[3][7] Burton said later that his sister became "more mother to me than any mother could have ever been... I was immensely proud of her... she felt all tragedies except her own". Burton's father would occasionally visit the homes of his grown daughters but was otherwise absent.[8]:7, 10 Also important in young Burton's life was Ifor (Ivor), the brother 19 years his senior. A miner and rugby player, Ifor "ruled the household with the proverbial firm hand".[5]:7
Burton showed a talent for English and Welsh literature at grammar school, and demonstrated an excellent memory, though his consuming interest was sports – rugby (in fact famous Welsh centre Bleddyn Williams said in his autobiography that Burton could have gone far as a player[9]), cricket, and table tennis[10] He later said, "I would rather have played for Wales at Cardiff Arms Park than Hamlet at the Old Vic."[8]:17 He earned pocket money by running messages, hauling horse manure, and delivering newspapers. He started to smoke at the age of eight and drink regularly at twelve.[4]:25–26 Inspired by his schoolmaster, Philip H. Burton, he excelled in school productions, his first being The Apple Cart.[4]:29 Philip could not legally adopt Burton because their age difference was one year short of the minimum twenty years required.[Did he want to? clarification needed][11]:47 Burton early on displayed an excellent speaking and singing voice and won an Eisteddfod prize as a boy soprano.[4]:27
Burton left school at sixteen for full-time work. He worked for the local wartime Co-operative committee, handing out supplies in exchange for coupons, but then considered other professions for his future, including boxing, religion and singing.[4]:27 When Burton joined the Port Talbot Squadron of the Air Training Corps as a cadet, he re-encountered Philip Burton, his former teacher, who was the commander. Richard also joined a youth drama group led by Leo Lloyd, a steel worker and avid amateur thespian, who taught him the fundamentals of acting.
Philip Burton, recognising Richard's talent, then adopted him as his ward and Richard returned to school, and, being older than most of the boys, he was very attractive to some of the girls.[4]:30–31 Philip Burton later said, "Richard was my son to all intents and purposes. I was committed to him."[4]:34 Philip Burton tutored his charge intensely in school subjects and also worked at developing the youth's acting voice, including outdoor voice drills which improved his projection.[8]:38
In 1943, at the age of eighteen, Richard Burton (who had now taken his teacher's surname but would not change it by deed poll for several years[5]:41), was allowed into Exeter College, Oxford for a special term of six months study, made possible because he was an air force cadet obligated to later military service. He subsequently did serve in the RAF (1944–1947) as a navigator. Burton's eyesight was too poor for him to be considered pilot material.[10]
Early acting career[link]
In the 1940s and early 1950s Burton worked on stage and in cinema in the United Kingdom. Before his war service with the Royal Air Force, he starred as Professor Higgins in a YMCA production of Pygmalion. He earned his first professional acting fees doing radio parts for the BBC.[4]:35 He had made his professional acting debut in Liverpool and London, appearing in Druid's Rest, a play by Emlyn Williams (who also became a guru), but his career was interrupted by conscription in 1944.[8]:44 Early on as an actor, he developed the habit of toting around a book-bag filled with novels, dictionaries, a complete Shakespeare, and books of quotations, history, and biography, and enjoyed solving crossword puzzles. Burton could, given any line from Shakespeare's works, recite from memory the next several minutes of lines.[12] His Welsh love of language was paramount, as he famously stated years later, with a tearful Elizabeth Taylor at his side, "The only thing in life is language. Not love. Not anything else."[8]:43
In 1947, after his discharge from the RAF, Burton went to London to seek his fortune. He immediately signed up with a theatrical agency to make himself available for casting calls.[4]:45 His first film was The Last Days of Dolwyn, set in a Welsh village about to be drowned to provide a reservoir. His reviews praised him for his "acting fire, manly bearing, and good looks."[4]:48
Burton met his future wife, the young actress Sybil Williams, on the set, and they married in February 1949. They had two daughters, and divorced in 1963 after Burton's widely reported affair with Elizabeth Taylor. In the years of his marriage to Sybil, Burton appeared in the West End in a highly successful production of The Lady's Not for Burning, alongside Sir John Gielgud and Claire Bloom, in both the London and NewYork productions. He had small parts in various British films: Now Barabbas Was A Robber; Waterfront (1950) with Robert Newton; The Woman with No Name (1951); and a bigger part as a smuggler in Green Grow the Rushes, a B-movie.[8]:70–71
Reviewers took notice of Burton: "He has all the qualifications of a leading man that the British film industry so badly needs at this juncture: youth, good looks, a photogenic face, obviously alert intelligence, and a trick of getting the maximum of attention with a minimum of fuss."[4]:51 In the 1951 season at Stratford, he gave a critically acclaimed performance and achieved stardom as Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1 opposite Anthony Quayle's Falstaff. Philip Burton arrived at Stratford to help coach his former charge, and he noted in his memoir that Quayle and Richard Burton had their differences about the interpretation of the Prince Hal role. Richard Burton was already demonstrating the same independence and competitiveness as an actor that he displayed off-stage in drinking, sport, or story-telling.[8]:73
Kenneth Tynan said of Burton's performance, "His playing of Prince Hal turned interested speculation to awe almost as soon as he started to speak; in the first intermission local critics stood agape in the lobbies."[4]:51 Suddenly, Richard Burton had fulfilled his guardian's wildest hopes and was admitted to the post-War British acting circle which included Anthony Quayle, John Gielgud, Michael Redgrave, Hugh Griffith and Paul Scofield. He even met Humphrey Bogart, a fellow hard drinker, who sang his praises back in Hollywood.[4]:56 Lauren Bacall recalled, "Bogie loved him. We all did. You had no alternative." Burton bought the first of many cars and celebrated by increasing his drinking.[8]:73–74 The following year, Burton signed a five-year contract with Alexander Korda at £100 a week, launching his Hollywood career.
Hollywood and later career[link]
In 1952, Burton successfully made the transition to a Hollywood star; on the recommendation of Daphne du Maurier, he was given the leading role in My Cousin Rachel opposite Olivia de Havilland.[4]:59 Burton arrived on the Hollywood scene at a time when the studios were struggling. Television's rise was drawing away viewers and the studios looked to new stars and new film technology to staunch the bleeding. 20th Century Fox negotiated with Korda to borrow him for this film and a further two at $50,000 a film. The film was a critical success. It established Burton as a Hollywood leading man and earned him his first Academy Award nomination and the Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year – Actor. In Desert Rats (1953), Burton plays a young English captain in the North African campaign during World War II who takes charge of a hopelessly out-numbered Australian unit against the indomitable Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (James Mason). Mason, another actor known for his distinctive voice and excellent elocution, became a friend of Burton's and introduced the new actor to the Hollywood crowd. In short order, he met Judy Garland, Greta Garbo, Stewart Granger, Jean Simmons, Deborah Kerr, and Cole Porter, and Burton met up again with Humphrey Bogart.[8]:82 At a party, he met a pregnant Elizabeth Taylor (then married to Michael Wilding) whose first impression of Burton was that "he was rather full of himself. I seem to remember that he never stopped talking, and I had given him the cold fish eye."[4]:60
The following year he created a sensation by starring in The Robe, the first film to premiere in the wide-screen process CinemaScope, winning another Oscar nomination. He replaced Tyrone Power, who was originally cast in the role of Marcellus, a noble but decadent Roman in command of the detachment of Roman soldiers that crucified Jesus Christ, who, haunted by his guilt from this act, is eventually led to his own conversion. Marcellus' Greek slave (played by Victor Mature) guides him as a spiritual teacher, and his wife (played by Jean Simmons) follows his lead, although it will mean both their deaths. The film marked a resurgence in Biblical blockbusters.[8]:85 Burton was offered a seven-year, $1 million contract by Darryl F. Zanuck at Fox, but he turned it down, though later the contract was revived and he agreed to it.[8]:87 It has been suggested that remarks Burton made about blacklisting Hollywood while filming The Robe may have explained his failure to ever win an Oscar, despite receiving seven nominations.
In 1954, Burton took his most famous radio role, as the narrator in the original production of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood, a role he would reprise in the film version twenty years later. He was also the narrator, as Winston Churchill, in the highly successful 1960 television documentary series The Valiant Years.[4]:90
Stage career[link]
Burton was still juggling theatre with film, playing Hamlet and Coriolanus at the Old Vic theatre in 1953 and alternating the roles of Iago and Othello with the Old Vic's other rising matinee idol John Neville. Hamlet was a challenge that both terrified and attracted him, as it was a role many of his peers in the British theatre had undertaken, including John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier.[8]:93 Bogart, on the other hand, warned him as Burton left Hollywood, "I never knew a man who played Hamlet who didn't die broke."[4]:67 Once again, Philip Burton provided expert coaching. Claire Bloom played Ophelia, and their work together led to a turbulent affair.[8]:94 His reviews in Hamlet were good but he received stronger praise for Coriolanus. His fellow actor Robert Hardy said, "His Coriolanus is quite easily the best I've ever seen" but Hamlet was "too strong".[8]:93
Burton appeared on Broadway, receiving a Tony Award nomination for Time Remembered (1958) and winning the award for playing King Arthur in the musical Camelot (1960), directed by Moss Hart and written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.[4]:67 Julie Andrews, fresh from her triumph in My Fair Lady, played Guenevere to Burton's King Arthur, with Robert Goulet as Lancelot completing the love triangle. The production was troubled, with both Loewe and Hart falling ill, numerous revisions upsetting the schedule and the actors, and the pressure building due to great expectations and huge advance sales. The show's running time was nearly five hours. Burton took it all in his stride and calmed people down with statements like "Don't worry, love." Burton's intense preparation and competitive desire served him well. He was generous and supportive to others who were suffering in the maelstrom. According to Lerner, "he kept the boat from rocking, and Camelot might never have reached New York if it hadn't been for him."[4]:93 As in the play, both male stars were enamoured of their leading lady, newly married Andrews. When Goulet turned to Burton for advice, Burton had none to offer, but later he admitted, "I tried everything on her myself. I couldn't get anywhere either."[4]:94 Burton's reviews were excellent, Time magazine stated that Burton "gives Arthur the skilful and vastly appealing performance that might be expected from one of England's finest young actors." The show's album was a major seller. The Kennedys, newly in the White House, also enjoyed the play and invited Burton for a visit, establishing the link of the idealistic young Kennedy administration with Camelot.
He then put his stage career on the back burner to concentrate on film, although he received a third Tony Award nomination when he reprised his Hamlet under John Gielgud's direction in 1964 in a production that holds the record for the longest run of the play in Broadway history (136 performances).[4]:148 The performance was immortalised both on record and on a film that played in US theatres for a week in 1964 as well as being the subject of books written by cast members William Redfield and Richard L. Sterne. Burton took the role on just after his marriage to Taylor. Since Burton disliked wearing period clothing, Gielgud conceived a production in a "rehearsal" setting with a half-finished set and actors wearing their street clothes (carefully selected while the production really was in rehearsal). Burton's basic reading of Hamlet, which displeased some theatre-goers, was of a complex manic-depressive personality, but during the long run he varied his performance considerably as a self-challenge and to keep his acting fresh. On the whole, Burton had good reviews. Time said that Burton "put his passion into Hamlet's language rather than the character. His acting is a technician's marvel. His voice has gem-cutting precision."[4]:144 The opening night party was a lavish affair, attended by six hundred celebrities who paid homage to the couple. The most successful aspect of the production was generally considered to be Hume Cronyn's performance as Polonius, winning Cronyn the only Tony Award that he would ever receive in a competitive category.
After his Hamlet, Burton did not return to the stage for twelve years until 1976 in Equus. (He did accept the role of Humbert Humbert in Alan Jay Lerner's musical adaptation of Lolita entitled Lolita, My Love. However he withdrew and was replaced by friend and fellow Welshman John Neville.) His performance as psychiatrist Martin Dysart won him both a special Tony Award for his appearance, but he had to make Exorcist II: The Heretic – a film he hated – before Hollywood producers would allow him to repeat his role in the 1977 film version. The final stage performance in which he starred was a critically reviled production of Noël Coward's Private Lives, opposite his ex-wife Elizabeth Taylor, in 1983. Most reviewers dismissed the production as a transparent attempt to capitalise on the couple's celebrity, although they grudgingly praised Burton as having the closest connection to Coward's play of anyone in the cast.
Hollywood career in the 1950s and 1960s[link]
In terms of critical success, Burton's Hollywood roles throughout the 1950s did not live up to the early promise of his debut. Burton returned to Hollywood to star in Prince of Players, another historical Cinemascope film, this time concerning Edwin Booth, famous American actor and brother of Abraham Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth. A weak script undermined a valiant effort by Burton, although the view of director Philip Dunne was that "The fire and intensity were there, but that was all. He hadn't yet mastered the tricks of the great movie stars, such as Gary Cooper."[4]:71 Next came Alexander the Great (1956), written, directed, and produced by Robert Rossen, with Burton in the title role, on a loan out to United Artists, and again with Claire Bloom co-starring. Contrary to Burton's expectations, the "intelligent epic" was a wooden, slow-paced flop.[4]:75
In The Rains of Ranchipur, Burton plays a noble Hindu doctor who attempts the spiritual recovery of an adulteress (Lana Turner). Critics felt that the film lacked star chemistry, with Burton having difficulty with the accent, and relied too heavily on Cinemascope special effects including an earthquake and a collapsing dam. Burton returned to the theatre in Henry V and Othello, alternating the roles of Iago and Othello. He and Sybil then moved to Switzerland to avoid high British taxes and to try to build a nest egg, for themselves and for Burton's family.[4]:75 He returned to film again in Sea Wife, shot in Jamaica and directed by Roberto Rossellini. A young Joan Collins (then called by the tabloids "Britain's bad girl") plays a nun shipwrecked on an island with three men. But Rossellini was let go after disagreements with Zanuck. According to Collins, Burton had a "take-the-money-and-run attitude" toward the film. Burton turned down the lead for Lawrence of Arabia, also turned down by Marlon Brando, which went to newcomer Peter O'Toole.[4]:75–77
Then in 1958, he was offered the part of Jimmy Porter, "an angry young man" role, in the film version of John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, a gritty drama about middle-class life in the British Midlands, directed by Tony Richardson, and again with Claire Bloom as co-star. Though it didn't do well commercially (many critics felt Burton, at 33, looked too old for the part) and Burton's Hollywood box office aura seemed to be diminishing, Burton was proud of the effort and wrote to his mentor Philip Burton, "I promise you that there isn't a shred of self-pity in my performance. I am for the first time ever looking forward to seeing a film in which I play".[8]:125 Next came The Bramble Bush and Ice Palace in 1960, neither important to Burton's career.
After playing King Arthur in Camelot on Broadway for six months, Burton replaced Stephen Boyd as Mark Antony in the troubled production Cleopatra (1963). Twentieth Century-Fox's future appeared to hinge on what became the most expensive movie ever made up until then, reaching almost $40 million.[4]:97 The film proved to be the start of Burton's most successful period in Hollywood; he would remain among the top 10 box-office earners for the next four years. During the filming, Burton met and fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor, who was married to Eddie Fisher. The two would not be free to marry until 1964 when their respective divorces were complete. On their first meeting on the set, Burton said "Has anyone ever told you that you're a very pretty girl?" Taylor later recalled, "I said to myself, Oy gevalt, here's the great lover, the great wit, the great intellectual of Wales, and he comes out with a line like that."[4]:103 In their first scenes together, he was shaky and missing his lines, and she soothed and coached him. Soon the affair began in earnest and Sybil, seeing this as more than a passing fling with a leading lady, was unable to bear it. She fled the set, first for Switzerland, then for London.
The gigantic scale of the troubled production, Taylor's bouts of illness and fluctuating weight, the off-screen turbulence—all generated enormous publicity, which by-and-large the studio embraced. Zanuck stated, "I think the Taylor-Burton association is quite constructive for our organization."[4]:118 The six-hour film was cut to under four, eliminating many of Burton's scenes, but the result was viewed the same—a film long on spectacle dominated by the two hottest stars in Hollywood. Their private lives turned out to be an endless source of curiosity for the media, and their marriage was also the start of a series of on-screen collaborations. In the end, the film did well enough to recoup its great cost.
Burton played Taylor's tycoon husband in The V.I.P.s, an all-star film set in the VIP lounge of London Airport which proved to be a box-office hit. Then Burton portrayed the archbishop martyred by Henry II in the title role of Becket, turning in an effective, restrained performance, contrasting with Peter O'Toole's manic portrayal of Henry.[4]:130
In 1964, Burton triumphed as defrocked Episcopal priest Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon in Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana directed by John Huston, a film which became another critical and box office success. Richard Burton's performance in The Night of the Iguana may be his finest hour on the screen, and in the process helped put the town of Puerto Vallarta on the map (the Burtons later bought a house there). Part of Burton's success was due to how well he varied his acting with the three female characters, each of whom he tries to seduce differently: Ava Gardner (the randy hotel owner), Sue Lyon (the nubile American tourist), and Deborah Kerr (the poor, repressed artist).[4]:135
Against his family's advice, Burton married Taylor on Sunday 15 March 1964, in Montreal. Ever optimistic, Taylor proclaimed, "I'm so happy you can't believe it. This marriage will last forever".[4]:140 At the hotel in Boston, the rabid crowd clawed at the newlyweds, Burton's coat was ripped and Taylor's ear was bloodied when someone tried to steal one of her earrings.[4]:142
After an interruption playing Hamlet on Broadway, Burton returned to film as British spy Alec Leamas in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Burton and Taylor continued making films together though the next one The Sandpiper (1965) was poorly received. Following that, he and Taylor had a great success in Mike Nichols's film (1966) of the Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, in which a bitter erudite couple spend the evening trading vicious barbs in front of their horrified and fascinated guests, played by George Segal and Sandy Dennis. Burton was not the first choice for the role of Taylor's husband. Jack Lemmon was offered the role first, but when he backed off, Jack Warner, with Taylor's insistence, agreed on Burton and paid him his price. Albee preferred Bette Davis and James Mason, fearing that the Burtons' strong screen presence would dominate the film.[4]:155, 163 Nichols, in his directorial debut, managed the Burtons brilliantly. The script, adapted from Albee's play by Hollywood veteran Ernest Lehman, broke new ground for its raw language and harsh depiction of marriage. Although all four actors received Oscar nominations for their roles in the film (the film received a total of thirteen), only Taylor and Dennis went on to win. So immersed had the Burtons become in the roles of George and Martha over the months of shooting, after the wrap Richard Burton said, "I feel rather lost."[4]:142 Later the couple would state that the film took its toll on their relationship, and that Taylor was "tired of playing Martha" in real life.[8]:206
Their lively version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew (1967), directed by Franco Zeffirelli, was a notable success. Later collaborations, however, The Comedians (1967), Boom! (1968), and the Burton-directed Doctor Faustus (1967) (which had its genesis from a theatre production he staged and starred in at the Oxford University Dramatic Society) were critical and commercial failures. He did enjoy a final commercial blockbuster with Clint Eastwood in Where Eagles Dare in 1968[13] but his last film of the decade, Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), was a commercial and critical disappointment. In spite of those failures, it performed remarkably well at that year's Academy awards (receiving ten nominations, including one for Burton's performance as Henry VIII), which many thought to be largely the result of an expensive advertising campaign by Universal Studios.[14]
Later career[link]
Because of Burton and Taylor's extravagant spending and his support of his family and others (42 people at one point), Burton agreed to work in mediocre films that hurt his career. He recognised his financial need to do so, and that in the New Hollywood era of cinema he or Taylor would not soon again be paid as well as at the height of their stardom.[13] Films he made during this period included Bluebeard (1972), Hammersmith Is Out (1972), The Klansman (1974), and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). He did enjoy one major critical success in the 1970s in the film version of his stage hit Equus, winning the Golden Globe Award as well as an Academy Award nomination. Public sentiment towards his perennial frustration at not winning an Oscar made many pundits consider him the favourite to finally win the award, but on Oscar Night he lost to Richard Dreyfuss in The Goodbye Girl.
In 1976 Burton received a Grammy in the category of Best Recording for Children for his narration of The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He also found success in 1978, when he narrated Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of The War of the Worlds. His distinctive performance became a necessary part of the concept album – so much so that a hologram of Burton is used to narrate the live stage show (touring in 2006, 2007, 2009 and 2010) of the musical.
Burton had an international box office hit with The Wild Geese (1978), an adventure tale about mercenaries in Africa. The film was a success in the UK and Europe but had only limited distribution in the U.S. owing to the collapse of the studio that funded it and the lack of an American star in the movie. He returned to appearing in critically reviled films like The Medusa Touch (1978), Circle of Two (1980), and the title role in Wagner (1983), a role he said he was born to play, after his success in Equus. His last film performance, as O'Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four, was critically acclaimed.[13]
At the time of his death, Burton was preparing to film Wild Geese II, the sequel to The Wild Geese, which was eventually released in 1985. Burton was to reprise the role of Colonel Faulkner, while his friend Sir Laurence Olivier was cast as Rudolf Hess. After his death, Burton was replaced by Edward Fox, and the character changed to Faulkner's younger brother.
Oscars[link]
He was nominated six times for an Academy Award for Best Actor and once for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor – but he never won. From 1982, he and Becket co-star Peter O'Toole shared the record for the male actor with the most nominations (7) for a competitive acting Oscar without ever winning. In 2007, O'Toole was nominated for an eighth time (and subsequently lost), for Venus (however, O'Toole received an Academy Honorary Award in 2003).
Television[link]
Burton rarely appeared on television, although he gave a memorable performance as Caliban in a televised production of The Tempest for The Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1960. Later appearances included the television film Divorce His – Divorce Hers (1973) opposite then-wife Elizabeth Taylor (a prophetic title, since their first marriage would be dissolved less than a year later), a remake of the classic film Brief Encounter (1974) that was considered vastly inferior to the 1945 original, and a critically applauded performance as Winston Churchill in The Gathering Storm (1974). A critically panned film he made about the life of Richard Wagner (noted for having the only onscreen teaming of Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson in the same scenes) was shown as a television miniseries in 1983 after failing to achieve a theatrical release in most countries, but Burton enjoyed a personal triumph in the American television miniseries Ellis Island in 1984, receiving a posthumous Emmy Award nomination for his final television performance.
Television played an important part in the fate of his Broadway appearance in Camelot. When the show's run was threatened by disappointing reviews, Burton and co-star Julie Andrews appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show to perform the number What Do The Simple Folk Do?. The television appearance renewed public interest in the production and extended its Broadway run.
Burton showed a subtle flair for comedy in a 1970 guest appearance with Elizabeth Taylor on the sitcom Here's Lucy, where he recited, in a plumber's uniform, a haunting excerpt of a speech from Shakespeare's Richard II. He later parodied this role in an episode of Television Show The Fall Guy.
In 1997, archive footage of Burton was used in the first episode of the television series Conan.[15]
Book[link]
In 1964, Burton wrote a semi-autobiographical book A Christmas Story, which is an endearing tale of a Christmas Eve in a Welsh mining village, during the Depression.[16]
Personal life[link]
Burton was married five times and he had four children. From 1949 until their divorce in 1963, he was married to producer Sybil Williams, by whom he had two daughters, Katherine "Kate" Burton (born 10 September 1957) and Jessica Burton (born 1961). He was married twice, consecutively, to actress Elizabeth Taylor, from 15 March 1964 to 26 June 1974 and from 10 October 1975 to 29 July 1976. Their first wedding took place in Montreal,[12] and their second wedding occurred, 16 months after their divorce, in the Chobe National Park in Botswana. In 1964, the couple adopted a daughter from Germany, Maria Burton (born 1 August 1961). Burton also adopted Taylor's daughter by the late producer Mike Todd, Elizabeth Frances "Liza" Todd Burton (born 6 August 1957).[17] Their relationship as portrayed in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was popularly likened to Burton and Taylor's real-life marriage.[18] Burton disagreed with others about Taylor's famed beauty, saying that calling her "the most beautiful woman in the world is absolute nonsense. She has wonderful eyes, but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest, and she’s rather short in the leg."[19] In August 1976, a month after his second divorce from Taylor, Burton married model Susan Hunt, the former wife of Formula 1 Champion James Hunt;[20] the marriage ended in divorce in 1982. From 1983 until his death in 1984, Burton was married to make-up artist Sally Hay.
In 1957 Burton became a tax exile by moving to Switzerland, where he lived until his death. It is widely believed he was never offered a knighthood due to his tax exile status, together with his attacks on Churchill and other controversial public opinions.
In 1968 Burton's elder brother, Ifor, slipped and fell, breaking his neck, after a lengthy drinking session with Burton at the actor's second home in Céligny, Switzerland. The injury left him paralysed from the neck down.[21] His younger brother Graham Jenkins opined it may have been guilt over this that caused Burton to start drinking very heavily, particularly after Ifor died in 1973.[22]
In a February 1975 interview with his friend David Lewin he said he "tried" homosexuality. He also suggested that perhaps all actors were latent homosexuals, and "we cover it up with drink".[23] In 2000, Ellis Amburn's biography of Elizabeth Taylor suggested that Burton had an affair with Laurence Olivier and tried to seduce Eddie Fisher[page needed], although this was strongly denied by Burton's younger brother Graham Jenkins.[24]
Burton was notorious for his unrestrained pursuit of women while filming. Joan Collins wrote that when she rejected his on-set advances, he embarked on a series of liaisons with other women including an elderly black maid who, according to Collins, was "almost toothless". Collins playfully told Burton that she believed he would sleep with a snake if he had the chance, to which Burton is alleged to have replied "only if it was wearing a skirt, darling".
He was an insomniac and a notoriously heavy drinker. However, ongoing back pain and a dependence upon pain medications have been suggested as the true cause of his misery. He was also a heavy smoker from the time he was just eight years old; and by his own admission in a December 1977 interview with Sir Ludovic Kennedy, Burton was smoking 60–100 cigarettes per day. According to his younger brother Graham Jenkins's 1988 book Richard Burton: My Brother, he smoked at least a hundred cigarettes a day.
His father, also a heavy drinker, refused to acknowledge his son's talents, achievements and acclaim.[7] In turn, Burton declined to attend his funeral, in 1957.[10] Like Burton, his father died from a cerebral haemorrhage, in January 1957, at the age of 81.
Burton admired and was inspired by the actor and dramatist Emlyn Williams. He employed his son Brook Williams as his personal assistant and adviser and he was given small roles in some of the films in which Burton starred.[25]
Burton was banned permanently from BBC productions in November 1974 for writing two newspaper articles questioning the sanity of Winston Churchill and others in power during World War II – Burton reported hating them "virulently" for the alleged promise to wipe out all Japanese people on the planet.[26] The publication of these articles coincided with what would have been Churchill's centenary, and came after Burton had played him in a favourable light in A Walk with Destiny, with considerable help from the Churchill family. In one article he accused Churchill of having Welsh miners shot during strikes in the 1920s.[citation needed] Ironically, Burton got along well with Churchill when he met him at a play in London, and kept a bust of him on his mantelpiece. On the Parkinson show in November 1974 Burton told a funny story about meeting Churchill; however, according to Robert Hardy, it was not true.[citation needed] Politically Burton was a lifelong socialist, although he was never as heavily involved in politics as his close friend Stanley Baker. He greatly admired Democratic Senator Robert F. Kennedy and once got into a sonnet-quoting contest with him. In 1973 Burton agreed to play Josef Broz Tito in a biopic, since he greatly admired the Yugoslav leader. While filming in Yugoslavia he publicly proclaimed that he was a communist, saying he felt no contradiction between earning vast sums of money for films and holding very left-wing views since "unlike capitalists, I don't exploit other people."[27] Burton courted further controversy in 1976 when he wrote a controversial article about his friend and fellow Welsh thespian Stanley Baker, who had recently died from pneumonia at the age of 48.[citation needed]
Health issues[link]
 |
This section includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (February 2011) |
The 1988 biography of Burton by Melvyn Bragg[8] provides a detailed description of the many health issues that plagued Burton throughout his life. In his youth, Burton was a star athlete and well known for his athletic abilities and strength. By the age of 41 he had declined so far in health that his arms were by his own admission thin and weak. He suffered from bursitis, possibly aggravated by faulty treatment, arthritis, dermatitis, cirrhosis of the liver and kidneys, as well as developing, by his mid-forties, a pronounced limp. How much of this was due to his intake of alcohol is impossible to ascertain, according to Bragg, because of Burton's reluctance to be treated for alcohol addiction; however, in 1974, Burton spent six weeks in a clinic to recuperate from a period during which he had been drinking three bottles of vodka a day. He was also a regular smoker, with an intake of between three and five packs a day for most of his adult life. Health issues continued to plague him until his death of a stroke at the age of 58.
Death[link]
Burton died at age 58 from a brain haemorrhage on 5 August 1984 at his home in Céligny, Switzerland, and is buried there.[28] Although his death was sudden, his health had been declining for several years, and he suffered from a constant and severe pain in the neck. He had been warned that his liver was enlarged as early as March 1970,[21] and had been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and kidneys in April 1981. Burton was buried in a red suit, a tribute to his Welsh roots, and with a copy of Dylan Thomas' poems.[29] He and Taylor had discussed being buried together; his widow Sally purchased the plot next to Burton's and erected a large headstone across both, likely to prevent Taylor from being buried there.[30]
Awards and nominations[link]
Academy Awards[link]
BAFTA Awards[link]
Emmy Awards[link]
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Golden Globe Awards[link]
Grammy Award Winner[link]
Tony Awards[link]
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Filmography[link]
Main article: Richard Burton filmography
Stage productions[link]
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Further reading[link]
- Shipman, D. The Great Movie Stars: The International Years, Angus & Robertson 1982. ISBN 0-207-14803-1
References[link]
- ^ Obituary Variety, 8 August 1984.
- ^ "Richard Burton: Works 1970s". The Official Richard Burton Website. 2008. http://www.richardburton.com/film_70sbot.htm. Retrieved 5 June 2008.
- ^ a b BBC Biography
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai Alpert, Hollis (1986). Burton. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. ISBN 0-399-13093-4.
- ^ a b c Jenkins, David (subject's elder brother) Richard Burton: A brother remembered, (2nd edn) Arrow Books London 1994
- ^ Parish, James Robert (2007). The Hollywood Book of Extravagance: The Totally Infamous, Mostly. John Wiley and Sons. p. 26. ISBN 0-470-05205-8.
- ^ a b welshwales.com biography
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Bragg, Melvyn (1988). Richard Burton: A Life. Boston, Massachusetts: Little Brown and Co.. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/0-316-10595-1|0-316-10595-1]].
- ^ "Richard Burton's Last Match" in Take the Ball and Run by Godfrey Smith (Pavillion, 1991). ISBN 978-1-85145-605-5
- ^ a b c Everything2 biography
- ^ Bragg, Melvyn (1990). Richard Burton: A Life (paperback/repack ed.). Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-35938-6.
- ^ a b Segal, Lionel (26 March 2011). "The witness to the wedding". Montreal Gazette. http://www.montrealgazette.com/opinion/editorials/witness+wedding/4507239/story.html. Retrieved 26 March 2011.
- ^ a b c Kashner, Sam; Schoenberger, Nancy (2010-07). "A Love Too Big To Last". Vanity Fair. http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/features/2010/07/elizabeth-taylor-201007?currentPage=all. Retrieved 24 March 2011.
- ^ Inside Oscar, Mason Wiley and Damien Boa, Ballantine Books (1986) pg. 434
- ^ Conan at the Internet Movie Database
- ^ '/ A Christmas Story at Amazon.com
- ^ "Q&A: An update on Elizabeth Taylor's four children". St. Petersburg Times. 12 January 2010. http://www.tampabay.com/news/humaninterest/qampa-an-update-on-elizabeth-taylors-four-children/1064792. Retrieved 20 April 2011.
- ^ Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton: The Film Collection – DVD
- ^ Gussow, Mel (23 March 2011). "Elizabeth Taylor, Lifelong Screen Star, Dies at 79". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/24/movies/elizabeth-taylor-obituary.html?_r=2&hp. Retrieved 23 March 2011.
- ^ "Richard Burton married model Susan Hunt in Arlington, Va.". The Modesto Bee. AP (Modesto, California): p. C-9. 22 August 1976. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=gEYhAAAAIBAJ&sjid=bn8FAAAAIBAJ&pg=5246%2C1864680. Retrieved 5 March 2011.
- ^ a b "Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor: The Love Letters. How drinking cocooned them from pressure of fame. Without it, they couldn't even make love". Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, Daily Mail, 7 June 2010
- ^ Jenkins, Graham Richard Burton: My Brother (1988)
- ^ Ferris, Paul Richard Burton (1981) pp. 170–71.
- ^ "Anger at claim Burton was gay". BBC News (Wales). 10 April 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/708074.stm. Retrieved 31 August 2009.
- ^ Brook Williams Obituary. The Independent. 11 June 2005. Retrieved 5 March 2011.
- ^ Munn, Michael, Richard Burton: prince of players, Skyhorse Publishing Inc., 2008. Cf. p.214 on Burton's diatribe and Winston Churchill.
- ^ Ferris, Paul Richard Burton (1981)
- ^ Dowd, Maureen (6 August 1984). "Richard Burton, 58, is Dead; Rakish Stage and Screen Star". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/1110.html. Retrieved 21 July 2007.
- ^ "South West Wales - Hall Of Fame". BBC. http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/southwest/halloffame/showbiz/richardburton.shtml. Retrieved 23 November 2011. "In accordance with his wishes, he was buried with a copy of the Complete Works of Dylan Thomas."
- ^ Boshoff, Alison (25 March 2011). "Is Liz Taylor's gay manager about to inherit her millions?". Daily Mail (UK). http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1369731/Elizabeth-Taylor-death-Gay-manager-Jason-Winters-inherit-millions.html?ito=feeds-newsxml. Retrieved 26 March 2011.
External links[link]
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Richard Burton |
- Official website of Richard Burton
- Richard Burton at Find a Grave
- Richard Burton at the Internet Broadway Database
- Richard Burton at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
- Richard Burton at the Internet Movie Database
- Richard Burton at the TCM Movie Database
- Richard Burton at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
- Richard Burton's yacht Kalizma
- Burton in the pub with his father and brother in Pontrhydyfen
- Richard Burton on the Dick Cavett Show, July 1980
| Husband of Elizabeth Taylor | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Eddie Fisher |
Husband of Elizabeth Taylor (by order of marriage) 1964–1974; 1975–1976 |
Succeeded by John Warner |
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Burton, Richard |
| Alternative names | Jenkins, Richard Walter Jr. |
| Short description | Welsh actor |
| Date of birth | 10 November 1925 |
| Place of birth | Pontrhydyfen, Wales, UK |
| Date of death | 5 August 1984 |
| Place of death | Céligny, Switzerland |
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
Not to be confused with Edith Corse Evans.
| Dame Edith Evans DBE |
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|---|---|
 |
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| Born | Edith Mary Evans (1888-02-08)8 February 1888 London, England, UK |
| Died | 14 October 1976(1976-10-14) (aged 88) Cranbrook, Kent, England, UK |
| Occupation | Actress |
| Years active | 1910–1976 |
| Spouse | George Booth (1925-1935) |
Dame Edith Mary Evans, DBE (8 February 1888 – 14 October 1976) was a British actress.[1] She was known for her work on the British stage. She also appeared in a number of films, for which she received three Academy Award nominations, plus a BAFTA and a Golden Globe award.
Evans was particularly well known at portraying haughty aristocratic ladies, as in two of her most famous roles: Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (both on stage and in the 1952 film), and Miss Western in the 1963 film of Tom Jones. By contrast, she played a poverty-stricken old woman in one of her most acclaimed film roles, in The Whisperers (1967).
Contents |
Theatre[link]
Edith Evans was born in London, the daughter of Edward Evans, a civil servant, and his wife, Caroline Ellen Foster. She was educated at St Michael's Church of England School, Pimlico, before being apprenticed at the age of 15 in 1903 as a milliner.
Her first stage appearance was with Miss Massey's Shakespeare Players in the role of Viola in Twelfth Night in October 1910. In 1912 she was discovered by the noted producer William Poel and made her first professional appearance for Poel in August of that year, playing the role of Gautami in a 6th century Hindu classic, Sakuntala. She received much attention with her performance as Cressida in Troilus and Cressida in London and subsequently at Stratford-upon-Avon.
Her career spanned sixty years during which she played over 150 different roles, in works by Shakespeare, Congreve, Ibsen, Wycherley, Wilde and dramatists of her era including George Bernard Shaw, Enid Bagnold, Christopher Fry and Noël Coward. She created six of Shaw's characters: the Serpent, the Oracle, the She-Ancient, and the Ghost of the Serpent in Back to Methuselah (1923); Orinthia in The Apple Cart (1929); and Epifania in The Millionairess (1940). Other performances which many considered definitive were as Millamant in The Way of the World (1924), Rosalind in As You Like It (1926 and 1936), the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet (1932-35 and 1961), and, most notably, as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1939), a role with which she became identified in the public's mind (in particular for her drippingly sarcastic delivery of the line: "A handbag?"). In 1964 she appeared as Judith Bliss in a revival of Hay Fever by Noël Coward, directed by the playwright himself, for the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic.
Film[link]
Edith Evans had begun her film career in 1915, but was noted mostly for her stage work until she appeared in the 1949 films The Queen of Spades and The Last Days of Dolwyn. She was the Ghost of Christmas Past in the 1970 musical version of Scrooge starring Albert Finney. Edith Evans made her American television debut in 1961 in Jean Anouilh's comedy, Time Remembered with Christopher Plummer.
In 1925, Edith Evans married George (Guy) Booth. He died a decade later from a brain tumour. There were no children of this marriage, and Evans never remarried.
Portraits[link]
Walter Sickert painted Edith Evans as Katharina, the lead character in Shakespeare's romantic comedy, The Taming of the Shrew. Henry Glintenkamp painted Edith Evans in 1922; the portrait was sold as part of her estate at Sotheby's in 1977. A sculpted head of her was for many years on display at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
Edith Evans was created a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1946. She also received four honorary degrees from the universities of London (1950), Cambridge (1951), Oxford (1954) and Hull (1968).
Her ashes rest at St Paul's, Covent Garden, London. There is a blue plaque outside her house at 109 Ebury Street, London.
Theatre[link]
- 1909-10: Bad Girl of the Family, Grand Theatre, Southampton
- 1912-13: Elizabeth Cooper, Haymarket
- 1917-18: Manfred, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
- 1919: Merchant of Venice, Royal Court Theatre
- 1920-21: Mother Eve, Ambassadors Theatre
- 1920-21: Witch of Edmonton, Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith
- 1922-23: Rumour, Globe Theatre
- 1923-24: Way of the World, Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith
- 1923-24: Adding Machine, Strand Theatre
- 1924: Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theatre Royal, Drury Lane
- 1924-25: Midsummer Night's Dream, Drury Lane
- 1925: The Painted Swan, Everyman Theatre
- 1925-26: Much Ado About Nothing, Old Vic
- 1925-26: She Stoops To Conquer, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Julius Caesar, Old Vic
- 1925-26: As You Like It, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Romeo and Juliet, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Shoemaker's Holiday, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Taming of the Shrew, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Antony and Cleopatra, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Measure for Measure, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Child in Flanders, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Everyman, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Merchant of Venice, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Richard III, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Merry Wives of Windsor, Old Vic
- 1925-26: Shakespeare Birthday Festival, Old Vic
- 1926-27: Rosmersholm, Kingsway Theatre
- 1927: The Way of the World, Wyndham's Theatre
- 1927-28: Shakespeare Birthday Festival, Old Vic
- 1928-29: Apple Cart, Malvern Theatre, Worcestershire
- 1929-30: Shakespeare Birthday Festival, Old Vic
- 1931: O.H.M.S., Arts Theatre, New Theatre
- 1931-32: Twelfth Night, Old Vic
- 1931-32: Shakespeare Birthday Festival, Old Vic
- 1931-32: Othello, Old Vic
- 1933: The Late Christopher Bean, St.James's Theatre
- 1935-36: Romeo and Juliet, New Theatre
- 1936-37: Taming of The Shrew, New Theatre
- 1936-37: Witch of Edmonton, Old Vic
- 1936-37: As You Like It, Old Vic; New Theatre
- 1936-37: Country Wife, Old Vic
- 1937: The Taming of The Shrew, New Theatre
- 1937-38: Robert's Wife, Globe Theatre
- 1938-39: Importance of Being Earnest, Globe Theatre
- 1939-40: Importance of Being Earnest, Prince's Theatre, Bristol
- 1946: Anthony and Cleopatra, Theatre Royal, Newcastle upon Tyne; Piccadilly Theatre
- 1949: Daphne Loreola, Wyndham's Theatre
- 1951: Waters of the Moon, Theatre Royal, Haymarket
- 1954: The Dark is Light Enough, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; Opera House, Manchester; Aldwych Theatre
- 1957: The Chalk Garden, Theatre Royal, Haymarket
- 1962 (4 March): Programme of Poetry and Music, Aldwych
- 1963: Gentle Jack, Queen's Theatre
- 1964: Hay Fever, Old Vic National Theatre
- 1965: The Chinese Prime Minister by Enid Bagnold, Globe Theatre
- 1968 (Feb):Aerial Football and The Black Girl in Search of God, Mermaid Theatre
- 1974: Edith Evans and Friends, Theatre Royal, Haymarket
Filmography[link]
| Year | Film | Role | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1915 | Honeymoon for Three | ||
| A Welsh Singer | Mrs. Pomfrey | ||
| 1916 | East Is East | Aunt | |
| 1949 | The Queen of Spades | The Old Countess Ranevskaya | |
| The Last Days of Dolwyn | Merri | aka Women of Dolwyn | |
| 1952 | The Importance of Being Earnest | Lady Augusta Bracknell | |
| 1958 | Look Back in Anger | Mrs. Tanner | |
| 1959 | The Nun's Story | Rev. Mother Emmanuel | (as Dame Edith Evans) National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated — Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture |
| 1963 | Tom Jones | Miss Western | Nominated — Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated — BAFTA Award for Best British Actress |
| 1964 | The Chalk Garden | Mrs. St. Maugham | National Board of Review Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated — Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress Nominated — BAFTA Award for Best British Actress |
| 1965 | Young Cassidy | Lady Gregory | |
| 1967 | The Whisperers | Mrs. Maggie Ross | BAFTA Award for Best British Actress Silver Bear for Best Actress (Berlin)[2] Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama National Board of Review Award for Best Actress New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress Nominated — Academy Award for Best Actress |
| Fitzwilly | Miss Victoria Woodworth | ||
| 1968 | Prudence and the Pill | Lady Roberta Bates | |
| 1969 | The Madwoman of Chaillot | Josephine | |
| Crooks and Coronets | Lady Sophie Fitzmore | ||
| 1970 | Scrooge | Ghost of Christmas Past | |
| 1973 | A Doll's House | Anne-Marie | |
| El caballo torero | |||
| 1974 | Craze | Aunt Louise | |
| 1976 | The Slipper and the Rose | Dowager Queen | |
| 1977 | Nasty Habits | Sister Hildegard |
Notes[link]
- 1977 - Ned's Girl by Bryan Forbes, Elm Tree Books
References[link]
- ^ Obituary Variety, 20 October 1976, page 205.
- ^ "Berlinale 1967: Prize Winners". berlinale.de. http://www.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/1967/03_preistr_ger_1967/03_Preistraeger_1967.html. Retrieved 2010-02-28.
External links[link]
|
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edith Evans |
- Edith Evans at the Internet Movie Database
- Edith Evans at the Internet Broadway Database
- Edith Evans biography and credits at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
- Performances by Edith Evans listed in The Theatre Collection, University of Bristol
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| Persondata | |
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| Name | Evans, Edith |
| Alternative names | Evans, Edith Mary |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | 8 February 1888 |
| Place of birth | London, England, UK |
| Date of death | 14 October 1976 |
| Place of death | Cranbrook, Kent, England, UK |
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
| Edmund Waller FRS |
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|---|---|
 Portrait of Edmund Waller, by John Riley, circa 1685 |
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| Born | (1606-03-03)March 3, 1606 Coleshill, Buckinghamshire, England |
| Died | October 21, 1687(1687-10-21) (aged 81) |
| Resting place | St Mary and All Saints Church, Beaconsfield |
| Nationality | English |
| Education | |
| Alma mater | King's College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | |
Edmund Waller, FRS (3 March 1606 – 21 October 1687) was an English poet and politician who sat in the House of Commons at various times between 1624 and 1679.
Contents |
Early life[link]
Edmund Waller was the eldest son of Robert Waller of Coleshill, Herts, and Anne Hampden, his wife; thus he was first cousin to John Hampden. He was descended from the Waller family of Groombridge Place, Kent. Early in his childhood his father moved the family to Beaconsfield. Of Waller's early education all we know is his own account that he "was bred under several ill, dull and ignorant schoolmasters, until he went to Mr Dobson at Wycombe, who was a good schoolmaster and had been an Eton scholar." Robert Waller died in 1616, and Anne, a lady of rare force of character, sent him to Eton and to the University of Cambridge. He was admitted a fellow-commoner of King's College, Cambridge on 22 March 1620, he left without a degree.[1] As a member of Parliament during the political turmoil of the 1640s, he was arrested for his part in a plot to establish London as a stronghold of the king; by betraying his colleagues and by lavish bribes, he avoided death. He later wrote poetic tributes to both Oliver Cromwell (1655) and Charles II (1660). Rejecting the dense intellectual verse of Metaphysical poetry, he adopted generalizing statement, easy associative development, and urbane social comment. With his emphasis on definitive phrasing through inversion and balance, he prepared the way for the emergence of the heroic couplet. By the end of the 17th century the heroic couplet was the dominant form of English poetry. Waller's lyrics include the well-known “Go, lovely Rose!”
Early parliamentary career[link]
In 1624 Waller was elected Member of Parliament for Ilchester after one of the members chose another seat. In 1626 he was elected MP for Chipping Wycombe. He was elected MP for Amersham in 1628 and sat until 1629 when King Charles decided to rule without parliament for eleven years.[2]
Marriage[link]
Waller's first notable action was his surreptitious marriage with a wealthy ward of the Court of Aldermen, in 1631. He was brought before the Star Chamber for this offence, and heavily fined. But his own fortune was large, and all his life Waller was a wealthy man. After bearing him a son and a daughter at Beaconsfield, Mrs Waller died in 1634. It was about this time that the poet was elected into the "Club" of Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland.
In about 1635 he met Lady Dorothy Sidney, eldest daughter of Robert Sidney, 2nd Earl of Leicester, who was then eighteen years of age. He formed a romantic passion for this girl, whom he celebrated under the name of Sacharissa. She rejected him, and married Henry Spencer, 1st Earl of Sunderland in 1639. Disappointment is said to have made Waller temporarily insane. However, he wrote a long, graceful and eminently sober letter to the bride's sister on the occasion of the wedding.
Speeches[link]
In April 1640 Waller was again elected MP for Amersham, in the Short Parliament and made certain speeches which attracted wide attention. He was then elected MP for St Ives in the Long Parliament.[2] Waller had hitherto supported the party of John Pym, but he now left him for the group of Falkland and Hyde. His speeches were much admired, and were separately printed; they are academic exercises very carefully prepared. Clarendon says that Waller spoke "upon all occasions with great sharpness and freedom."
"Waller's Plot"[link]
An extraordinary and obscure conspiracy against Parliament, in favour of the king, which is known as "Waller's Plot," occupied the spring of 1643, but on 30 May he and his friends were arrested. In the terror of discovery, Waller was accused of testifying against the others. He was called before the bar of the House in July, and made an abject speech of recantation. His life was spared and he was committed to the Tower of London, but, on paying a fine of £10,000, he was released and banished from the realm in November 1643.
Banishment[link]
He married a second wife, Mary Bracey of Thame, and went over to Calais, afterwards taking up his residence at Rouen. In 1645 the Poems of Waller were first published in London, in three different editions; there has been much discussion of the order and respective authority of these issues, but nothing is decidedly known. Many of the lyrics were already set to music by Henry Lawes.
In 1646 Waller travelled with John Evelyn in Switzerland and Italy. During the worst period of his exile Waller managed to "keep a table"[clarification needed] for the Royalists in Paris, although in order to do so he was obliged to sell his wife's jewels.
Return to England[link]
File:EdmundWallerdetail.jpg
Detail of portrait of Waller, by Kneller
At the close of 1651 the British House of Commons revoked Waller's sentence of banishment, and he was allowed to return to Beaconsfield, where he lived very quietly until the Restoration. In 1655 he published A Panegyric to my Lord Protector, and was made a Commissioner for Trade a month or two later, he followed this, in 1660, with a poem To the King, upon his Majesty's Happy Return. Being challenged by Charles II to explain why this latter piece was inferior to the eulogy of Cromwell, the poet smartly replied, "Sir, we poets never succeed so well in writing truth as in fiction".
Waller entered the House of Commons again in 1661, as MP for Hastings, and Burnet has recorded that for the next quarter of a century "it was no House if Waller was not there". His sympathies were tolerant and kindly, and he constantly defended the Nonconformists.
One famous speech of Waller's was: "Let us look to our Government, fleet and trade, 'tis the best advice the oldest Parliament man among you can give you, and so God bless you."
Later life[link]
After the death of his second wife, in 1677, Waller retired to Hall Barn, the house he had designed and owned in Beaconsfield, and though he returned to London, he became more and more attached to the retirement of his woods, "where," he said, "he found the trees as bare and withered as himself." In 1661 he had published his poem, St James' Park; in 1664 he had collected his poetical works; in 1666 appeared his Instructions to a Painter; and in 1685 his Divine Poems. The final collection of his works is dated 1686, but there were further posthumous additions made in 1690.
Waller bought a cottage at Coleshill, where he was born, meaning to die there; "a stag," he said, "when he is hunted, and near spent, always returns home." He actually died, however, at Hall Barn, with his children and his grandchildren about him, on 21 October 1687, and was buried in woollen (in spite of his expressed wish), in the churchyard of St Mary and All Saints Church, Beaconsfield.[3]
Verse[link]
Waller's lyrics were at one time admired to excess, but with the exception of "Song"(Go, lovely Rose) and one or two others, they have lost their popularity. He lacked imaginative invention, but resolutely placed himself in the forefront of reaction against the violence and "conceit" into which the baser kind of English poetry was descending.
Waller was regarded by some as the pioneer in introducing the classical couplet into English verse. It is, of course, obvious that Waller could not "introduce" what had been invented, and admirably exemplified, by Geoffrey Chaucer. But those who have pointed to smooth distichs employed by poets earlier than Waller have not given sufficient attention to the fact (exaggerated, doubtless, by critics arguing in the opposite camp) that it was he who earliest made writing in the serried couplet the habit and the fashion. Waller was writing in the regular heroic measure, afterwards carried to so high a perfection by John Dryden and Alexander Pope, perhaps even in 1621.
References[link]
- ^ Venn, J.; Venn, J. A., eds. (1922–1958). "Waller, Edmund". Alumni Cantabrigienses (10 vols) (online ed.). Cambridge University Press.
- ^ a b Willis, Browne (1750). Notitia Parliamentaria, Part II: A Series or Lists of the Representatives in the several Parliaments held from the Reformation 1541, to the Restoration 1660 .... London. pp. 229–239. http://books.google.com/books?id=5V09AAAAYAAJ&pg=RA2-PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- ^ Greenwood, Douglas (1999). Who's Buried where in England (Third ed.). Constable. p. 128. ISBN 0-09-479310-7.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. - Theophilus Cibber, "The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland: to the time of Dean Swift", vol.II, R. Griffiths, London, 1753, pp. 240–264
Trivia[link]
Edmund Waller Primary School is in New Cross, South East London.
External links[link]
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Wikisource has original works written by or about: |
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Edmund Waller |
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Edmund Waller |
"Waller, Edmund". Dictionary of National Biography. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 1885–1900. - Works by Edmund Waller at Project Gutenberg
- Full text of Poetical Works of Edmund Waller and Sir John Denham from Project Gutenberg
| Parliament of England | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Sir Richard Alyne Nathaniel Topkins |
Member of Parliament for Ilchester 1624 With: Sir Richard Alyne |
Succeeded by Sir Robert Gage Richard Wynn |
| Preceded by Henry Coke Thomas Lane |
Member of Parliament for Wycombe 1626 With: Henry Coke |
Succeeded by Thomas Lane Sir William Borlase |
| Preceded by William Clarke Francis Drake |
Member of Parliament for Amersham 1628-1629 With: William Hakewill |
Succeeded by Parliament suspended until 1640 |
| Preceded by Parliament suspended since 1629 |
Member of Parliament for Amersham 1640 With: William Drake |
Succeeded by Francis Drake William Cheyney |
| Preceded by Sir Denny Ashburnham Nicholas Delves |
Member of Parliament for Hastings 1660–1679 With: Sir Denny Ashburnham |
Succeeded by Sir Robert Parker John Ashburnham |
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Waller, Edmund |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | English politician |
| Date of birth | 3 March 1606 |
| Place of birth | Coleshill, Buckinghamshire, England |
| Date of death | 21 October 1687 |
| Place of death | |
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
For other people named James Mason, see James Mason (disambiguation).
| James Mason | |
|---|---|
_James_Mason.jpg) Mason in 1959 as he appeared in the film North by Northwest |
|
| Born | James Neville Mason (1909-05-15)15 May 1909 Huddersfield, West Riding of Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 27 July 1984(1984-07-27) (aged 75) Lausanne, Romandy, Switzerland |
| Alma mater | Cambridge University |
| Occupation | Actor |
| Years active | 1935–1984 |
| Spouse | Pamela Mason (m.1941-1964; divorced) Clarissa Kaye-Mason (m.1971-1984; his death) |
James Neville Mason (15 May 1909 - 27 July 1984) was an English actor who attained stardom in both British and American films. Mason remained a powerful figure in the industry throughout his career and was nominated for three Academy Awards as well as three Golden Globes (winning once).
Contents |
Biography[link]
Early life[link]
Mason was born in Huddersfield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, to John and Mabel Mason; his father was a wealthy merchant. He was educated at Marlborough College, and earned a first in architecture at Peterhouse, Cambridge where he became involved in stock theatre companies in his spare time. Mason had no formal training as an actor and initially embarked upon it for fun. After Cambridge he joined the Old Vic theatre in London under the guidance of Tyrone Guthrie and Alexander Korda. In 1933 Korda gave Mason a small role in The Private Life of Don Juan but fired him three days into shooting.[1]
Career[link]
From 1935 to 1948 he starred in many British quota quickies. A conscientious objector during World War II[2] (causing his family to break with him for many years), he became immensely popular for his brooding anti-heroes in the Gainsborough series of melodramas of the 1940s, including The Man in Grey (1943) and The Wicked Lady (1945). He also starred with Deborah Kerr and Robert Newton in Hatter's Castle (1942). He then took the lead role in the critically acclaimed and immensely popular The Seventh Veil (1945) that set box office records in postwar Britain and raised him to international stardom. He followed it with a role as a mortally wounded Irish bank robber in Odd Man Out (1947) and his first Hollywood film, Caught (1949). Exhibitors voted him the most popular star in Britain in 1944 and 1945.[3]
Mason's distinctive voice enabled him to play a menacing villain as greatly as his good looks assisted him as a leading man. His roles include Brutus in Julius Caesar (1953), Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel and The Desert Rats, the amoral valet turned spy in Joseph Mankiewicz's 5 Fingers, the declining actor in the first remake of A Star Is Born (1954), Captain Nemo in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (also 1954), a small town school teacher driven insane by the effects of cortisone in Bigger Than Life (1956), a suave master spy in North by Northwest (1959), a determined explorer in Journey to the Center of the Earth (also 1959), Humbert Humbert in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita (1962), a river pirate who betrays Peter O'Toole's character in Lord Jim (1965), the evil Doctor Polidori in Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), the vampire's servant, Richard Straker, in Salem's Lot, and surreal Royal Navy Captain Hughes in Yellowbeard (1983). One of his last roles, that of corrupt lawyer Ed Concannon in The Verdict (1982), earned him his third and final Oscar nomination.
His final screen-work was playing the lead role in Dr. Fischer of Geneva (adapted from the Graham Greene novella, 1985) as the eccentric wealthy businessman who played games with the Swiss upper class, such as offering gifts to his guests on the proviso they accepted some humiliating ritual activity (such as wearing a child's bib at the dinner table). In 1975 he played Falconhurst plantation owner in the controversial film Mandingo.
In the late 1970s, Mason became a mentor to up-and-coming actor Sam Neill.
Late in life, he served as narrator for a British television series on the films of Charlie Chaplin, Unknown Chaplin, which was aired in the U.S. on PBS and later issued on home video.[4]
Private life[link]
Mason was a devoted lover of animals, particularly cats. He and his wife, Pamela Mason, co-authored the book The Cats in Our Lives, which was published in 1949. James Mason wrote most of the book and also illustrated it. In The Cats in Our Lives, he recounted humorous and sometimes touching tales of the cats (as well as a few dogs) he had known and loved.
Mason was married twice:
- First from 1941 to 1964 to British actress Pamela Mason (née Ostrer) (1916–1996); one daughter, Portland Mason Schuyler (1948–2004), and one son, Morgan (who is married to Belinda Carlisle, the lead singer of The Go-Go's. Their son, James Duke Mason, is also an actor). Portland Mason was named for Portland Hoffa, the wife of the American radio comedian Fred Allen; the Allens and the Masons were friends.
- Australian actress Clarissa Kaye (1971-his death). Tobe Hooper's DVD commentary for Salem's Lot reveals that Mason regularly worked contractual clauses into his later work guaranteeing Kaye bit parts in his film appearances.
Mason's autobiography, Before I Forget, was published in 1981.
Death[link]
Mason survived a cardiac arrest in 1959 and died as a result of another on 27 July 1984 in Lausanne, Switzerland.[5] He was cremated and (after a delay of 16 years) his ashes were buried in Corsier-sur-Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. The remains of Mason's old friend Charlie Chaplin are in a tomb a few steps away.
Mason's widow, Clarissa Kaye, also known as Kaye-Mason, died in 1994 from cancer.
Filmography[link]
|
|
Box Office Ranking[link]
For a number of years, exhibitors voted him among the top ten stars at the British box office via an annual poll in the Motion Picture Herald.
- 1945 - most popular British star[6]
- 1946 - most popular British and international star [7]
- 1947 - most popular British and 2nd most popular international star[8]
- 1952 - 7th most popular international star[9]
Influence[link]
The stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard often impersonates James Mason's voice saying it is the voice of God; it is a running gag in his shows.[10]
References[link]
- ^ Before I forget: autobiography and drawings by James Mason. page 89. ISBN 978-0-241-10677-8.
- ^ Thomson, David (2009-05-15) Every word a poison dart, The Guardian
- ^ "JAMES MASON NAMED AGAIN AS BRITAIN'S BRIGHTEST STAR.". The Mercury (Hobart, Tas. : 1860 - 1954) (Hobart, Tas.: National Library of Australia): p. 3 Supplement: The Mercury Magazine. 2 March 1946. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26173214. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
- ^ amazon.com
- ^ Obituary Variety, August 1, 1984.
- ^ "JAMES MASON NAMED AGAIN AS BRITAIN'S BRIGHTEST STAR.". The Mercury (Hobart, Tas. : 1860 - 1954) (Hobart, Tas.: National Library of Australia): p. 3 Supplement: The Mercury Magazine. 2 March 1946. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26173214. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
- ^ "FILM WORLD.". The West Australian (Perth, WA : 1879 - 1954) (Perth, WA: National Library of Australia): p. 20 Edition: SECOND EDITION.. 28 February 1947. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article46266039. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
- ^ "Anna Neagle Most Popular Actress.". The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW : 1842 - 1954) (NSW: National Library of Australia): p. 3. 3 January 1948. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article27893195. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
- ^ "COMEDIAN TOPS FILM POLL.". The Sunday Herald (Sydney, NSW : 1949 - 1953) (Sydney, NSW: National Library of Australia): p. 4. 28 December 1952. http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article18504988. Retrieved 27 April 2012.
- ^ The Best DVDs You've Never Seen, Just Missed Or Almost Forgotten. page 123. Macmillan, 2005. ISBN 0-312-34362-0.
External links[link]
|
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: James Mason |
- James Mason at the Internet Movie Database
- James Mason at the TCM Movie Database
- Performances listed in Theatre Archive University of Bristol
- James Mason at the Internet Broadway Database
- James Mason at the British Film Institute's Screenonline
- Literature on James Mason
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Mason, James |
| Alternative names | Mason, James Neville |
| Short description | English actor |
| Date of birth | 15 May 1909 |
| Place of birth | Huddersfield, England |
| Date of death | 27 July 1984 |
| Place of death | Lausanne, Switzerland |
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This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Mason
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
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